Alan wrote:

quoted

I think that this is mostly true, but we also need to balance this against the 
need for higher levels to get a timely response.  In a really large IO, a naive 
retry of a very large write could lead to a non-responsive system for a very 
large time...

And losing the I/O could result in a system that is non responsive until
the tape restore completes two days later....

Which brings us back to a recent discussion at the file system workshop on being 
more repair oriented in file system design so we can survive situations like 
this a bit more reliably ;-)

ric