Two more

Posted Mar 31, 2009 21:02 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
In reply to: Two more by man_ls
Parent article: From ext3 to ext4: An Interview with Theodore Ts'o (Linux Magazine)

There are multiple issues being mixed together in these discussions, I think. If you are talking about the zero length file issues, Ted suggested that it was an application usage problem but added hacks to workaround the issues anyway. It seems a lot of people just ignored that for whatever reasons.

Workarounds

Posted Mar 31, 2009 21:40 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (5 responses)

Just for one reason: because Mr Ts'o never admitted to being wrong. In Catholic terms, what good is reparation without repentance? Or, how can you ever learn from your mistakes if you don't admit them in the first place?

Workarounds

Posted Mar 31, 2009 21:50 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (4 responses)

You seem to be making it a religious black and white issue while I think, there is weight in both sides of the debate. One important consequence is that if applications rely on Ext3 like behavior, then those applications will fail miserably when running on other filesystems that haven't adopted the same characteristics and that was among the things Ted pointed out.

The very same blog post that describes the problems also mentions that fixes have already been queued. Technically, I don't know what more you could ask for. To be clear, there are other potential issues present but the ones you are talking about were fixed even before the blog post was written.

Workarounds

Posted Mar 31, 2009 22:47 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (3 responses)

What other filesystems are you talking about? On ext2 and other filesystems without a journal, sure, users know the risks and live with them. But applications seem to work fine on most other journaling filesystems: ext3, reiserfs, hfs+, zfs, even xfs was fixed years ago. Cygwin on ntfs works fine.

There are few black and white issues, but a filesystem developer saying that corrupting user data is fine would seem to qualify. Later commiting a fix to "work around" the problem while a hundred thousand developers fix their code is hardly enough. Technically, I am not even sure a public flogging would be enough.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, with your kind permission I will just call Ts'o a nazi in a half-assed invocation of Godwin's law to jump out of this discussion and go to sleep.

Workarounds

Posted Mar 31, 2009 23:52 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

Maybe FAT? what about filesystems beyond those in Linux? That's the point of POSIX. I don't see anyone ever claiming that losing data is fine. It is much more nuanced debate than that and I am sure you are aware of the issues very well so I won't bother repeating it again but I still don't know why you think hundreds of applications have to be fixed when the patch has already been merged to retains the Ext3 like behavior.

Workarounds

Posted Apr 1, 2009 0:04 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (1 responses)

> Maybe FAT?

Actually, you don't even have to look at other file systems. ext3 in writeback mode is sufficient, because metadata can go to disk before data. You may end up with garbage in your files after the crash.

Workarounds

Posted Apr 1, 2009 6:52 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Writeback mode? FAT?!? Please leave your (metaphorical) commit rights in the reception on your way out. Both of you.

Two more

Posted Apr 3, 2009 14:03 UTC (Fri) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link]

Ted suggested that it was an application usage problem but added hacks to workaround the issues anyway.

It's a question of trust. Do I trust my data to a file system whose developer has the attitude that Ted T'so has? Not if I have an alternative.