Ts'o: Delayed allocation and the zero-length file problem

"When you rename one file over another, the destination file is atomically replaced with the new file. The new file is fully consistent with the data that has already been written, which in the worst case means it has a size of zero after a crash."

Sorry this doesn't make any sense. Atomicity in this context means that when executing a rename, you always get either the old data (exactly) or the new data. Your worst case scenario -- a size of zero after crash -- precisely violates atomicity.

For the record, the first 2 paragraphs are equally mysterious: "This means the transaction commit doesn't have to wait for the data blocks...". Um, is the data ordered or not? If you commit the transaction -- i.e. update the metadata before the data blocks are committed, then the operations are occurring out of order and ext4 open-write-close-rename mayhem ensues.