Re: Which version will be merged into mainline kernel?

[Christopher Chan <chrisfz@netvigator.com>]

> While we are at it:
> 
> I take it that this is the reason journalling support is only picking up
> now: the disks are so big that even in the unlikely event that some of the
> hardware failsafes fail, one just cannot fsck all the disks completely
> anymore, ever.

Only picking up now??

reiserfs was the first filesystem available for Linux with journaling 
support. NTFS for Windows had it a long time ago. Other Unix's had 
journaling a long time ago too.

FreeBSD, Solaris and the other BSD's had another theory for file system 
reliability and speed implemented under softupdates a long time ago too.

journaling support has been late on Linux. Everything seems to be late 
on Linux. Real-time support, preemptive support...

> 
> So the choice is really 'borked once, borked forever' / 'journal it and at
> least somehow get it back online without fscking /
> copying-to-new-disks-if-at-all-possible for 5 days straight'.

No. Choices are: sync only (no write caching), turn on softupdates if 
supported, turn on various degrees of journaling if supported or async 
only (who cares?)

If you have fsync/fsyncdata available, databases, mtas and other 
software should not care less how the filesystem is mounted.