[geeks] Solaris 10 / OpenSolaris bits to be in next version of OSX

[der Mouse]

> If, for example, a block didn't get written to disk half-way down the
> tree (eg, the disk didn't write it for some reason) then it knows not
> to trust anything below that point and it will go to the redundant
> copy.

Maybe it's just me, but I'd *much* rather get a panic in that case
rather than silently using the redundant copy.  If my system is
silently failing to write data to disk, something is critically wrong,
whether hardware or software, and I'd much rather it crashed, or at
least failed the relevant drive out of service, than pretended
everything is fine.

This might be useful for those environments where uptime trumps
everything else, but they're not all that common.

>> If this is true, then I definitely would not trust ZFS, because you
>> just described them trying to handle a situation that should not be
>> handled.
> Why not?  It handles it by using redundancy - and in particular a
> redundant copy that we _know_ we can trust due to the checksum.

You don't, actually.  If something is failing to write data, you don't
(can't) know whether it's the data or the saved checksum that's been
mis-written, and have no particular reason to trust the redundant copy
either.  It too could be out of date, after all; if the disk (or disk
subsystem software) can lose one write, it can lose two writes.

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