Shared pain

Posted Feb 2, 2012 23:41 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Shared pain by dgc
Parent article: XFS: the filesystem of the future?

rename is atomic, but it is not a barrier and never has implied that one exists. rename() has been around for 3 times longer than ext3, so I don't really see how ext3 behaviour can possibly be what generations of programmers expect to see....

Easy: most currently active programmers never seen a Unix with journalling FS and without the ability to safely use rename across reboots. Actually they very much insist on such ability - and looks like XFS developers try to provide the capability. But it's not clear if you can trust them: clearly they value POSIX compatibility and benchmarks more then needs of real users (who need working applications, after all, filesystem needs are just minor implementation detail for them).

Indeed, ext3 has unique rename behaviour as a side effect of data=ordered mode - it flushes the data before flushing the metadata, and so appears to give rename "barrier" semantics. It's the exception, not the rule.

When "exception" happens in 90% cases it becomes a new rule - it's as simple as that.

However, no-one has ever followed up on such discussions with patches to the VFS to make this a standard behaviour that you can rely on all linux filesystems to support.

That's because we already have a solution: don't use XFS and you are golden. OSes exist to support application - as you've succinctly shown above with rsync example. The only problem: I'm not all that concerned with rsync speed. I need mundane things: fast compilation (solved with gobs of RAM and SSD, filesystem is minor issue after that), reliable work with bunch of desktop applications (which don't issue fsync(2) before rename(2), obviously). Since I already have a solution I don't see why I should push the patches. If you want to advocate xfs - then you must fix it's problems, I'm happy with ext3/ext4 (which may contain bugs but which at least don't try to play "all your apps are broken, you should just fix them" card).