Re: Linux 2.6.29

Andreas T.Auer
2009-03-30T07:13:36Z

On 30.03.2009 02:39 Theodore Tso wrote:
> All I can do is apologize to all other filesystem developers profusely
> for ext3's data=ordered semantics; at this point, I very much regret
> that we made data=ordered the default for ext3. But the application
> writers vastly outnumber us, and realistically we're not going to be
> able to easily roll back eight years of application writers being
> trained that fsync() is not necessary, and actually is detrimental for
> ext3.
>
>
It seems you still didn't get the point. ext3 data=ordered is not the
problem. The problem is that the average developer doesn't expect the fs
to _re-order_ stuff. This is how most common fs did work long before
ext3 has been introduced. They just know that there is a caching and
they might lose recent data, but they expect the fs on disk to be a
snapshot of the fs in memory at some time before the crash (except when
crashing while writing). But the re-ordering brings it to the state that
never has been in memory. data=ordered is just reflecting this thinking.
With data=writeback as the default the users would have lost data and
would have simply chosen a different fs instead of twisting the params.
Or the distros would have made data=ordered the default to prevent
beeing blamed for the data loss.

And still I don't know any reason, why it makes sense to write the
metadata to non-existing data immediately instead of delaying that, too.