Re: document ext3 requirements

Alan Cox
2009-01-05T11:45:11Z

> If dm supported barriers, this wouldn't be an issue. Personally, I

"If the dm people applied the patches to support barriers" I believe is
the correct description - Andi ?

dm and md want fixing and even in the md case it isn't hard to do right.

> > or disabling write cache (but, as Alan Cox said, this
> > shortens the lifespan of the disk).
>
> Huh? I've never heard an assertion that disabling the write cache (I
> assume you mean using write-through caching as opposed to write-back
> caching), shortens the lifespan of disk drives. Aggressive battery

Thats what I was told by a disk vendor - simply because the drive makes a
lot more mechanical movements and writes.

> your noticing it, you can avoid running fsck at boot time. It's
> really more about shorting the boot time after a crash more than
> anything else.

That depends enormously on your environment. In a secure environment full
data journalling is practically essential to avoid the tiny risk of bits
of important data turning up in another users file.

Alan