Re: EXT3 & EXT4 filesystems are NOT safe.

Art Kagel wrote: > Friends, Colleagues, Clients: > > According to Linus Torvalds, Linux's EXT3 filesystem is not safe since > it writes its meta data to disk before committing the related data > changes to the file. This can mean corrupted files if the system > crashes between the two non-atomic writes to disk. About this EXT3 > algorithm, Linus says: "Whoever came up with that solution was a moron. > No ifs, buts, or maybes about it." > > According to Slash-Dot, the new EXT4 filesystem suffers from a different > but related problem. It also writes its meta data first, but also does > note physically allocate disk blocks to a new or expanding file until > the data is committed (ie synced) to disk in order to facillitate > optimized elevator writes. The result is the same after an > inconveniently timed crash as it is in EXT3. The developer of EXT4 has > added a new mount mode to EXT4 but it is not expected to make it into > any current kernel releases until the next experimental release sometime > next year. About EXT4 Linus says: 'ext4 just defaults to the crappy > "writeback" behavior, which is insane." > I wonder who put these into the kernel. -- Ian Hotmail is for spammers. Real mail address is igoddard at nildram co uk