Re: [PULL REQUEST] ext3, jbd, ext2, and quota fixes for 3.1-rc1

Ted Ts'o
2011-07-27T00:31:27Z

On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 12:14:28PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 11:59 AM, Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> wrote:
> >
> > In addition to beeing bogus the code also is useless.  fsync on a file
> > explicitly does not guarantee anything at all about the parent, and
> > never really has on Linux either.
>
> Well, it may never have done that, but it might still be a case of
> quality-of-implementation.
>
> The data blocks and inode indirect blocks being stable on disk doesn't
> help hugely if you cannnot actually reach the inode itself.

Yeah, that's why it was done. Frank found that with power-fail
testing, a large number of files that were freshly created and then
fsync()'ed would disappear. If the data is supposed to be available
after a power failure, then you have to be able to get to it somehow.

I agree what's there isn't safe, and needs to be fixed. I'll deal
with it.

- Ted