[lug] Rather disturbing

[Zan Lynx]

On Thu, 2004-02-26 at 17:10, Gary Hodges wrote:
> Thanks for the comments.  Sure sounds like what you describe is exactly 
> what happened.  Would ext3 have done the same thing?  I also discovered 
> that a file I was editing at the time, and had been saved, has 
> disappeared.  This seems to contradict slightly your description of how 
> ReiserFS works.  I don't know about the availability of patches for 
> ReiserFS for SuSE 9.0.  I certainly haven't applied any knowingly, but I 
> will look into this.

ext3 uses ordered mode by default, so it writes data to disk before
updating the meta-data.  That means ext3 won't have strange content in
the files like what you saw.

The file that you had saved...how long before the crash was that?  On my
system here, I am using a 2.6 kernel with the anticipatory I/O
scheduler, and the time limit for writes is 25 seconds.

I'm not sure, but your system may have written the data to memory and
reported the write complete before it actually got to the disk.

Email servers put a lot of effort into using fsync calls and rename to
make absolutely sure a file is on disk before they report it sent or
received.  Most text editors don't go to so much trouble.
-- 
Zan Lynx <zlynx at acm.org>
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