Re: srfs - a new file system.

[Pat LaVarre <p.lavarre@ieee.org>]

> There are lots of ways to read back garbage from a disk unrelated to
> physical HDD errors: memory errors, bad cables, software errors (driver,
> fs, vm, etc), bad IDE DMA settings, power failures during write, etc...

Yes, thank you for finding words to express that fact so much more
clearly than I did.

> There are lots of ways to read back garbage from a disk unrelated to
> physical HDD errors: memory errors, bad cables, software errors (driver,
> fs, vm, etc), bad IDE DMA settings, power failures during write, etc...

In particular, I see HDD's vary in their opinion of which cabling and
configuration and protocol is bad.  Therefore I ask:

"How can we know how commonly that occurs in practice, so that we can
know how often we're wrong to believe such things as our locally
recorded vector time?"

Is there, as yet, no linux filesystem that preserves the integrity of
the data and metadata despite such failures?  If I could write such an
fs on to a single directly-attached local drive, then I could measure
how often I myself experience such failures.

I'm confident I actually do experience these failures because often I
work in comparative, raid-like measures.  When I see one drive and
another disagree about what I wrote, then whenever I trust my write and
diff and read tools I must conclude one or both of the HDD's is wrong.

Pat LaVarre