That massive filesystem thread [LWN.net]

That massive filesystem thread

Posted Apr 1, 2009 7:38 UTC (Wed) by bakterie (subscriber, #37541)
Parent article: That massive filesystem thread

How do filesystems other than ext3/4 do it? I haven't seen mentions of
other filesystems in the discussions, but then again I haven't looked very
hard. One of my computers is using reiserfs. How does reiserfs do it?

(Log in to post comments)

That massive filesystem thread

Posted Apr 1, 2009 11:17 UTC (Wed) by masoncl (subscriber, #47138) [Link]

More or less exactly the same as ext3 ;) The reiesrfs data=ordered is very similar to ext3.

That massive filesystem thread

Posted Apr 2, 2009 0:37 UTC (Thu) by davecb (subscriber, #1574) [Link]

How do filesystems other than ext3/4 do it?

Well, the Unix v6 filesystem implemented
in-order writes, as did 4.x BSD and the
other pre-journaled filesystems. POSIX allows
reordering to make coalesence easy, as
a lot of research was being done at that
time to get better performance.

A colleague at ICL (hi, Ian!) did his
masters at UofT on that, and found you
could get a performance improvement
and still preserve correctness by using
what I'd characterize as tsort(1), which
worked better than BSD/Solaris soft updates.

--dave