Messages in this thread |  | | | Subject | Re: Soft metadata updates paper w/code | | Date | Tue, 22 Jul 1997 09:50:55 +0200 (MET DST) | | From | (Rogier Wolff) |
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Colin Plumb wrote: > > Looking at reiserfs, I found a University of Michigan tech report > on "soft updates" a technique to remove all synchronous writes > from a file system yet maintain fsck-less crashes. > > (By always marking data in use before it's used and ensuring that > data is not used before it's marked free, a crash can leave some
If you first mark a block as used, and only then write the block, the filesystem won't be corrupt when the system crashes inbetween. However, your DATA will be corrupt.
I think it's better to have fsck detect a broken filesystem, than to have a file silently contain bad data. As far as I know, Linus also thinks this way.
You also eliminate the possibility of reordering writes at the driver or drive level. (e.g. "tagged queuing" is forbidden...)
All this would be very hard to debug: You'd have to try throwing the switch on your system quite a few times to be sure it works.
Roger.
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