ext4 and data consistency

ext4 and data consistency

Posted May 15, 2010 9:19 UTC (Sat) by anton (subscriber, #25547)
In reply to: ext4 and data consistency by njs
Parent article: The Next3 filesystem

Speed is too important

For whom? For me data consistency is much more important. Before barriers were supported, we ran ext3 on IDE disks without write caching, and that's really slow. The file system was still fast enough.

Stephen Tweedie didn't make data=journal the default, either.

Actually he did, at least at the start. Later it got changed (by whom?) to data=ordered; that still has the potential to provide data consistency unless existing files are overwritten.

As for an example: Consider a process writing file A and then file B. With ext4 I expect that it can happen that after recovery B is present and A is not or is empty. With ext3 I expect that this does not happen. But given that I did not find any documented guarantees in Documentation/filesystems/ext3.fs, maybe we should lump ext3 with tmpfs, too.

Still, my search brought up a Linux file system that gives guarantees: In nilfs2.txt it says:

order=strict	Apply strict in-order semantics that preserves sequence
		of all file operations including overwriting of data
		blocks.  That means, it is guaranteed that no
		overtaking of events occurs in the recovered file
		system after a crash.

Yes, that's exactly the guarantee I want to see. This means that any application that keeps its files consistent as visible from other processes will also have consistent files after an OS crash.

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