Re: [PATCH 1/5] jbd: strictly check for write errors on data buffers

Andrew Morton
2008-06-04T18:32:38Z

On Wed, 4 Jun 2008 12:19:25 +0200 Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> wrote:

> On Tue 03-06-08 15:30:50, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > On Mon, 02 Jun 2008 19:43:57 +0900
> > Hidehiro Kawai <hidehiro.kawai.ez@hitachi.com> wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > In ordered mode, we should abort journaling when an I/O error has
> > > occurred on a file data buffer in the committing transaction.
> >
> > Why should we do that?
> I see two reasons:
> 1) If fs below us is returning IO errors, we don't really know how severe
> it is so it's safest to stop accepting writes. Also user notices the
> problem early this way. I agree that with the growing size of disks and
> thus probability of seeing IO error, we should probably think of something
> cleverer than this but aborting seems better than just doing nothing.
>
> 2) If the IO error is just transient (i.e., link to NAS is disconnected for
> a while), we would silently break ordering mode guarantees (user could be
> able to see old / uninitialized data).
>

Does any other filesystem driver turn the fs read-only on the first
write-IO-error?

It seems like a big policy change to me. For a lot of applications
it's effectively a complete outage and people might get a bit upset if
this happens on the first blip from their NAS.

<waves vigorously at linux-ext4 people>