Ext4 data corruption trouble [LWN.net]

Ext4 data corruption trouble

Posted Oct 25, 2012 9:31 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to: Ext4 data corruption trouble by nix
Parent article: Ext4 data corruption trouble [Updated]

That which doesn't kill ext4, makes ext4 stronger. Once the general media realize that only a fraction of a percent of users are affected, they will probably post some kind of correction and everything will go back to normal -- and ext4 will be stronger by it.

Remember the stupid "neutrinos faster than light" news where all media outlets were reporting that Einstein had been rebutted, and that we were close to time travel? In the end it was all a faulty hardware connection, the original results were corrected and the speed of light paradigm came out stronger than ever. In that case it was a few hundreds of scientists signing the original paper that started the wildfire, instead of checking and rechecking everything for a few months before publishing such a fundamental result. I hope they are widely discredited now, all 170 of them (I am not joking now, either in the figure or in the malignity).

So in a few days the bug will be pinned to a very specific and uninteresting condition, and ext4 will come out stronger than ever. One data point: I have seen no corruption with 3.6.3, but then I am never rebooting while unmounting. Now I will be unmounting with extra care :)

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Ext4 data corruption trouble

Posted Oct 25, 2012 13:33 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

That FTL neutrino case is actually more similar than you thought -- scientific paper publication (and, these days, arxiv) is directly analogous to development lists like lkml -- it is where the practitioners in the field communicate. So having hundreds of scientists sign that paper is quite expected -- they worked on the collaboration, after all. What is unjustified is for the general media to pick up something like that, always and necessarily a work-in-progress, and consider it a finished deal, certain, unchanging.

LWN's coverage of this was much much better, emphasising the unclear and under-investigation nature of the thing.

A few things

Posted Oct 25, 2012 14:03 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Actually, the "neutrino anomaly" team gave several press conferences and a webcast. Without that attention-seeking part the story would probably not have blown so big. Imagine if Tso had given a press conference explaining the ext4 bug, instead of just dealing with it?

Also, hundreds of names on a paper may be standard practice, but it is ridiculous. Somebody should compute something like the Einstein index but dividing each result by the number of collaborators.

Finally, it appears from the wikipedia article that the Gran Sasso scientists had sat on their results for six months before publishing them. Even though I called for the same embargo in my post, that they did somehow only makes it worse -- but then life is unfair.