Improving ext4: bigalloc, inline data, and metadata checksums

Posted Dec 6, 2011 1:24 UTC (Tue) by tytso (✭ supporter ✭, #9993)
In reply to: Improving ext4: bigalloc, inline data, and metadata checksums by cmccabe
Parent article: Improving ext4: bigalloc, inline data, and metadata checksums

The problems with Soft Updates are quite adequately summed up here, by Val Aurora (formerly Henson): http://lwn.net/Articles/339337/

My favorite line from that article is "...and then I turn to page 8 and my head explodes."

The *BSD's didn't get advanced features such as Extended Attribute until some 2 or 3 years after Linux. My theory why is that it required someone as smart as Kirk McKusick to be able to modify UFS with Soft Updates to add support for Extended Attributes and ACL's.

Also, note that because of how Soft Update works, it requires forcing metadata blocks out to disk more frequently than without Soft Updates; it is not free. What's worse, it depends on the disk not reordering write requests, which modern disks do to avoid seeks (in some cases a write can not make it onto the platter in the absence of a Cache Flush request for 5-10 seconds or more). If you disable the HDD's write cacheing, your lose a lot of performance on HDD's; if you leave it enabled (which is the default) your data is not safe.

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Improving ext4: bigalloc, inline data, and metadata checksums

Posted Dec 11, 2011 10:18 UTC (Sun) by vsrinivas (subscriber, #56913) [Link]

FFS w/ soft updates assumes that drives honor write requests in the order they were dispatched. This is not necessarily the case, weakening the guarantees it means to provide. Also FFS doesn't ever issue what linux calls 'barriers' (on BSD known as device cache flushes or BUF_CMD_FLUSH).

Improving ext4: bigalloc, inline data, and metadata checksums

Posted Dec 21, 2011 23:09 UTC (Wed) by GalacticDomin8r (guest, #81935) [Link]

> Also, note that because of how Soft Update works, it requires forcing metadata blocks out to disk more frequently than without Soft Updates

Duh. Can you name a file system with integrity features that doesn't introduce a performance penalty? I thought not. The point is that the Soft Updates method is (far) less overhead than most.

> What's worse, it depends on the disk not reordering write requests

Bald faced lie. The only requirement of SU's is that writes reported as done by disk driver are indeed safely landed in the nonvolatile storage.

Improving ext4: bigalloc, inline data, and metadata checksums

Posted Dec 22, 2011 11:32 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

A little civility would be appreciated. Unless you're a minor filesystem deity in pseudonymous disguise, it is reasonable to assume that Ted knows a hell of a lot more about filesystems than you (because he knows a hell of a lot more about filesystems than almost anyone). It's also extremely impolite to accuse someone of lying unless you have proof that what they are saying is not only wrong but maliciously meant. That is very unlikely here.