Filesystems (ext3, reiser, xfs, jfs) comparison on Debian Etch (Debian Administration)

Posted Apr 26, 2006 15:14 UTC (Wed) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]

I saw refernces to that misconception twice yesterday. Oddly, the last time I encountered it (that I remember) was in 1979 when my first computer science instructor made reference to the "fact" that the drive did that. I believed it at the time, and then later decided it was urban legend.

I notice in your previous post you indicate that they don't do that "anymore". Did they really used to do that?

Also of note, and sorry, I don't have a ready link, I was once struck by a thread on lkml in which someone was crash testing different filesystems under Linux. He had a filesystem with lots of writes going on and knew what all the md5sums should be or something like that and would then pull the plug at random times and observe what happened. His question to the list was for someone to please point out what he was "doing wrong". You see, all the other filesystems in the test corrupted files with more or less the same frequency. All except for ext3, that is. It seemed never (or very rarely) to ever corrupt files and he felt that there must be a problem with his methodology. It was explained that ext3 defaults to data=ordered mode and that such behavior was really expected.

My summary of the thread is probably not completely accurate because it's been a while since I read it, but I was struck by the fact that someone observed the difference even though they were not expecting it.

If I can dig up a link, I'll post it.