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That massive filesystem threadThat massive filesystem threadPosted Apr 1, 2009 18:09 UTC (Wed) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331)In reply to: That massive filesystem thread by bojan Parent article: That massive filesystem thread By your logic, we should never fix bugs. Remember the 25 year old readdir bug? Don't you agree it was good to fix that? What if a program, somewhere, depended on that behavior? In reality, programs use rename for atomic replacement. POSIX doesn't say anything about guarantees after a hard system crash, and it's just disingenuous to think that by punishing application authors by giving them as little robustness as possible, you're doing them some kind of portability favor.
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That massive filesystem thread Posted Apr 1, 2009 20:55 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]
I will just answer this one comment, so that nobody gets "offended".
Quite the opposite. I'm all for fixing bugs and giving application programmers the _right_ tools for the job. If some Linux developers took a second to lift their noses out of the specifics of Linux and actually looked around, this could be fixed for _everyone_, not just for some Linux specific file systems. That is my point, in case you didn't get it by now.
That massive filesystem thread Posted Apr 1, 2009 21:37 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] It is a worthless effort. Each filesystem must keep its house clean. Why invent a new system call which cannot (by necessity) be honored by ext2, or ext4 without a journal? Everything is working now fine in ext3, and if it doesn't work right in ext4 people will just look for a different filesystem.After reading that Linus is not pulling from Mr Tso's trees made me suspect. Well, now that Ts'o's commit rights have been officially revoked I think that the whole discussion is moot. I wonder if the next ext4 head maintainer will learn from this painful experience and just do the right thing.
ext4 trees Posted Apr 1, 2009 21:46 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] I'm confused. The article said that Ted's trees had not been pulled yet. In fact, that happened today; a bunch of ext4 work went into the mainline, including a number of patches which increase robustness for applications which don't use fsync(). I dunno what you were trying to link to, but it didn't work. I've not seen anything about revocation of commit rights. (It's hard to "revoke commit rights" in a distributed system in any case; at worst you can refuse to pull from somebody else's repository.)Maybe it's an April 1 post that went over my head?
Recursive linking Posted Apr 2, 2009 6:21 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Sorry, it was a stupid attempt from a foreigner at an April Fools' prank :D I was hoping that the recursive link would give it away, but maybe it was too plausible altogether.Will try to do better next time :D)
That massive filesystem thread Posted Apr 1, 2009 22:38 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]
Just a few points, so please don't get offended. I apologise in advance to all sensitive LWN readers for any injury caused by this post.
> Why invent a new system call which cannot (by necessity) be honored by ext2, or ext4 without a journal?
Even if there was some kind of magical law that said that you could not order commits on the non-journaled file system this way, it can always be trivially implemented through - wait for it - fsync(), which has acceptable performance characteristics on such file systems.
> Everything is working now fine in ext3
Sure. Except fsync(), which locks the whole system for a few seconds. Hopefully, this will get fixed (or at least its effect reduced) as a result of the hoopla.
> Well, now that Ts'o's commit rights have been officially revoked I think that the whole discussion is moot.
Now you are really making a fool of yourself.
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