Re: [PATCH 00/23] per device dirty throttling -v8

Florian Weimer
2007-08-05T07:57:02Z

* Andrew Morton:

>> XFS overwrites that data with zeros upon reboot, which tends to
>> irritate users when it happens.
>
> yup.
>
>> >From this point of view, data=ordered doesn't seem too bad.
>
> If your computer is used by multiple users who don't trust each other,
> sure. That covers, what? About 2% of machines?

I wasn't concerned so much with security, but with user experience.
For instance, some editors don't perform fsync-then-rename, but simply
truncate the file when saving (because they want to preserve hard
links). With XFS, this tends to cause null bytes on crashes. Since
ext3 has got a much larger install base, this would result in lots of
bug reports, I fear.

Without zeroing, the truncating editor might garble the file in a more
obvious way, but you've got the security issue (and I agree that this
is more of a PR issue).