NetBSD feature end-of-life announcement: soft dependencies

Soft dependencies, also known as soft updates or softdep, is a method of maintaining file system integrity across an unscheduled system shutdown. It improves file system performance by allowing metadata writes to the file system to take place asynchronously. Soft dependencies was introduced with NetBSD 1.5.

The upcoming 5.0 release of NetBSD will include an alternative technology contributed by Wasabi Systems Inc.: Write Ahead Physical Block Logging, or logging. Logging will provide a feature set and performance profile superior to soft dependencies. One compelling advantage is that file systems using it need not be checked with the fsck utility after an unscheduled system shutdown.

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