ext4 and data loss [LWN.net]

ext4 and data loss

Posted Mar 13, 2009 0:31 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: ext4 and data loss by nye
Parent article: ext4 and data loss

That's exactly what it does. Patches recently committed to the mainline
cause the blocks to be aggressively flushed if the file is closed and was
originally opened via O_TRUNC, or if the file is renamed on top of another
one.

(I'd prefer it to delay the metadata operation as well, but apparently
that's really hard. Knowing what a nightmare it is to get rename() right,
I can understand that doing it lazily might not be anyone's cup of tea.)

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ext4 and data loss

Posted Mar 22, 2009 22:01 UTC (Sun) by muwlgr (guest, #35359) [Link]

I would not say "aggressively flushed". As I understand, blocks of these files (created/truncated, then closed, or renamed to replace previous file) are just explicitly allocated (triggering all necessary metadata updates to be then written in the correct order).