ext4 and data loss

Posted Mar 12, 2009 2:56 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
In reply to: ext4 and data loss by JoeBuck
Parent article: ext4 and data loss

That really sucks, doesn't it. I think Ted addressed that with:

> If you really care about making sure something is on disk, you have to use fsync or fdatasync. If you are about the performance overhead of fsync(), fdatasync() is much less heavyweight, if you can arrange to make sure that the size of the file doesn't change often. You can do that via a binary database, that is grown in chunks, and rarely truncated.

Linux, meet the Registry

Posted Mar 12, 2009 13:37 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (10 responses)

You can do that via a binary database, that is grown in chunks, and rarely truncated.

So does this mean the Linux desktops should now start using something like the Windows registry database?

Linux, meet the Registry

Posted Mar 12, 2009 23:17 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (9 responses)

Ted mentioned in the FOSDEM talk this year (video available online), that many developers ( GNOME and KDE included) tends to use hundreds of small files with very small amounts of data and that isn't really a bright idea compared to a centralized registry. Something to consider.

Linux, meet the Registry

Posted Mar 13, 2009 0:02 UTC (Fri) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (7 responses)

When this central registry gets stuffed, the whole lot is stuffed (see: Windows). Small files that are merged together into a tree are not _that_ stupid. And, you can remove directories that contain them in order to remove parts of the tree - simple.

Maybe the real solution is to not write them out unless absolutely necessary.

Linux, meet the Registry

Posted Mar 13, 2009 2:00 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (6 responses)

Centralized doesn't mean binary. Even assuming it is, Firefox is using sqlite databases instead of inventing their own binary format. Binary is not necessarily evil as people seem to think. I don't see how your solution would work. When you don't write them out, you stand a higher chance of losing that data which is exactly the problem

Linux, meet the Registry

Posted Mar 13, 2009 2:46 UTC (Fri) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331) [Link]

The filesystem is already a hierarchical database. Putting a hierarchical database on top of the filesystem is redundant. Fix bugs instead of working around them!

Linux, meet the Registry

Posted Mar 13, 2009 3:37 UTC (Fri) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (4 responses)

> Centralized doesn't mean binary.

Say you want to fix a corrupt gconf XML file that is 20 lines long. The easy fix is to delete it and recreate the settings using preferences or gconf editor.

Say you want to fix a corrupt gconf XML file that is 200,000 lines long. Well, good luck not mucking it up in vi so it still parses.

> Even assuming it is, Firefox is using sqlite databases instead of inventing their own binary format.

Which, as we've seen, comes with its own set of problems on ext3. And, once again, if the DB file gets screwed, you are completely out of luck - _all_ your settings are gone. Eggs in one basket and all that.

> Binary is not necessarily evil as people seem to think.

Yeah, tell that to people with corrupt Windows registry.

> I don't see how your solution would work. When you don't write them out, you stand a higher chance of losing that data which is exactly the problem.

Nobody said anything about not writing them out. The problem is that it appears they are being written out even when _not_ required and in large numbers.

When users make changes to configuration, these are localised changes. Users don't normally change 200 settings at once. So, this will touch a very limited number of files that need to be persisted to disk using fsync. The problem is the currently hundreds of files are being persisted to disk often.

Linux, meet the Registry

Posted Mar 13, 2009 5:32 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (3 responses)

> Binary is not necessarily evil as people seem to think.

Yeah, tell that to people with corrupt Windows registry.

The binary/text distinction is rather illusory. Text is simply a binary file that uses a subset of byte values to represent data, and certain values as delimiters. What really matters is how a file format is structured. A binary file can be organized so that recovering data from it is possible (what does fsck(8) really do? Fix corruption in a complex binary file, with the constraint that the operation must be done in-place).

Linux, meet the Registry

Posted Mar 13, 2009 5:56 UTC (Fri) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

> The binary/text distinction is rather illusory.

Yeah. I edit SQLite files in vi all the time ;-)

Illusory?

Posted Mar 13, 2009 13:14 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

The binary/text distinction is not illusory; it is a cognitive issue. Limiting file contents to printable characters (not just byte values since you can use multi-byte characters) makes people be able to edit them. Text files do not usually contain just random characters; they contain readable words that can be understood and documented rather easily.

The machine doesn't care, true, but to people there is a big difference between a sequence of random byte values and a sequence of written words. Just as, to me personally, there is a big difference between a text in Spanish and a set of cyrillic Russian words.

Linux, meet the Registry

Posted Mar 19, 2009 9:31 UTC (Thu) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link]

[[ The binary/text distinction is rather illusory. ]]

For computers yes, for human this is very different, that's the point!

If you have a corrupted binary, it's very, very difficult for an human to fix it (unless there's a tool which fix it "auto-magically"), whereas for a text there is still the possibility for the human to fix it.

A FS is a database, fsck is the tool to fix it (up to a point), if you add other databases in a FS this add the possibility of additional errors fixable only by the tools, with structured text files (JSON is nice: easy to read and to parse) you have the best of both worlds.

Linux, meet the Registry

Posted Sep 9, 2009 22:02 UTC (Wed) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link]

The Namesys paradigm of file-per-atom is a good idea, it's just that filesystems aren't up to the task. Too bad its creator went on to worse ideas.

ext4 and data loss

Posted Mar 12, 2009 20:04 UTC (Thu) by samroberts (subscriber, #46749) [Link] (5 responses)

"If you really care to make sure something is on disk".

There is no class of applications that write data to a file and don't
expect it to be written to disk.

For a long time fsync/O_SYNC were essentially no-ops on linux, the
attitude of the kernel developers being "apps call write(), the kernel
will put it on disk when its efficient to do so" and "linux is not a
real-time OS". Now Ted is calling such applications "badly written"? B.S.

That said, I sympathize with him about user's whining that data is lost
when their OS crashes. If your operating sytem crashes, you lose all
guarantees that it worked. Such is life. Either use an OS that doesn't
crash, or run filesystems in real-time modes that write data to disk as
soon as possible after the app does the file write, and live with the
performance loss.

It seemed to work fine

Posted Mar 12, 2009 22:46 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (1 responses)

Or... stay with ext3?

It seemed to work fine

Posted Mar 12, 2009 22:54 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

... which is of course your second option. Sorry, not having enough coffee these days.

ext4 and data loss

Posted Mar 13, 2009 14:45 UTC (Fri) by jbailey (guest, #16890) [Link]

It's not a matter of expect to be written to disk or not, it's the performance tradeoff versus data security should it not be written to disk. An MTA must make sure that it's committed to disk because it's irretrievable if it's not. A word processor autosave, not so much. Non-error log files, same thing.

My machine has certainly been writing things to disk all while I'm reading lwn here (logs, browser cache. If I were at home, it could be bittorrent, etc). My life wouldn't be any poorer if the system were to crash right now and none of that were recoverable.

ext4 and data loss

Posted Mar 13, 2009 22:47 UTC (Fri) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

> There is no class of applications that write data to a file and don't expect it to be written to disk.

Any application that uses temporary files is OK with data not hitting the disk.

ext4 and data loss

Posted Mar 17, 2009 21:56 UTC (Tue) by pphaneuf (guest, #23480) [Link]

"No class of applications", you say?

/var/run being on a tmpfs makes sense (if we crash, then it's okay, they're not running anymore).

Another more practical one is my browser cache. If it got blown away on every reboot, I wouldn't really mind, and I would actually be pretty angry if my browser started doing fsync on every little thing (hmm, where have I heard this?).