Re: [linux-pm] Massive ext4 filesystem corruption after a failed s2disk/ram cycle

KOSAKI Motohiro
2009-11-04T02:18:06Z

> On Wed, Oct 07, 2009 at 01:14:10PM +1100, Daniel Pittman wrote:
> > For what it is worth, I would also be quite interested to know /why/ XFS is
> > bad in this regard. Is it just the previously stated "XFS writes to disk
> > despite freezing kernel threads" issue, or something deeper?
>
> sync pushes out all data to disk, but in a journaling filesystem that
> might just but the log not the "normal" place on disk. For a boot
> loader to deal with it properly it actually needs to do an replay of
> the log. Grub does so for reiserfs but not for XFS for some reason.
> I don't know why problems don't trigger more often with ext3, though.

I'm sorry for the long delayed and offtopic responce. I discussed this
issue with okuji-san (GRUB2 maintainer) at several month ago.
He really wish linux implement real sync.

A bootloader has much constraint than OS (mainly caused by size constraint).
it can't implemnt jornal log replay logic for _all_ filesystem. Why can't we
implement storong sync syscall? I don't think this is PM nor bootloader fault.