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ext4 experienceext4 experiencePosted Nov 30, 2011 9:00 UTC (Wed) by Cato (subscriber, #7643)In reply to: ext4 experience by ringerc Parent article: Improving ext4: bigalloc, inline data, and metadata checksums
You are right about battery backup. Every modern hard disk uses writeback caching, and some of them make it hard to ensure that the cache is flushed when the kernel wants to ensure a write barrier is implemented. The size of hard disk caches (32 MB typically) and the use of journalling filesystems (concentrating key metadata writes in journal blocks) can mean that a power loss or hard crash loses a large amount of filesystem metadata.
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ext4 experience Posted Nov 30, 2011 12:40 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] My system was using Linux Software RAID, so there wasn't a cheap RAID controller in the mix. You could be correct about the hard drives doing caching, but it seems odd that I've never seen this with ext3 but did with ext4. I am still hoping it was simply bad luck, bad timing, and writeback caching... but I'm also still pretty nervous.
ext4 experience Posted Nov 30, 2011 12:50 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] Ah... reading http://serverfault.com/questions/279571/lvm-dangers-and-caveats makes me think I was a victim of LVM and no write barriers. I've followed the suggestions in that article. So maybe I'll give ext4 another try.
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