Workarounds

Posted Mar 31, 2009 22:47 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091)
In reply to: Workarounds by rahulsundaram
Parent article: From ext3 to ext4: An Interview with Theodore Ts'o (Linux Magazine)

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.