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SubjectRe: what is our answer to ZFS?
Chris Adams wrote:
> Once upon a time, Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> said:
>
>>It was a nice try but there is a giant gotcha most people forget. Its
>>only safe to make this assumption while you have all of the
>>files/directories in question open.
>

Right, at the time the structures were created removable (in any sense)
media usually meant 1/2 inch mag tape, not block storage. The inode was
pretty well set by SysIII, IIRC.
>
> Tru64 adds a "st_gen" field to struct stat. It is an unsigned int that
> is a "generation" counter for a particular inode. To get a collision
> while creating and removing files, you'd have to remove and create a
> file with the same inode 2^32 times while tar (or whatever) is running.
> Here's what stat(2) says:
>
> Two structure members in <sys/stat.h> uniquely identify a file in a file
> system: st_ino, the file serial number, and st_dev, the device id for the
> directory that contains the file.
>
> [Tru64 UNIX] However, in the rare case when a user application has been
> deleting open files, and a file serial number is reused, a third structure
> member in <sys/stat.h>, the file generation number, is needed to uniquely
> identify a file. This member, st_gen, is used in addition to st_ino and
> st_dev.
>
Shades of VMS! Of course that's not unique, I believe iso9660 (CD) has
versioning which is almost never used.

--
-bill davidsen (davidsen@tmr.com)
"The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the
last possible moment - but no longer" -me

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