Messages in this thread | | | From | Mirian Crzig Lennox <> | Subject | Re: scary ext2 filesystem question | Date | 25 Dec 1998 19:10:28 -0500 |
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Kurt Garloff <K.Garloff@ping.de> writes: > On Fri, Dec 25, 1998 at 11:42:57AM -0500, Mirian Crzig Lennox wrote: > > _Practical File System Design_, Dominic Giampaolo, p. 36 > > Nonsense! > The ext2fs uses write cacheing, like any powerful filesystem does. > This cannot confuse any program. Any program that reads data from the disk > goes through the page cache, so it get's the recent data, whether it was > written to disk yet, or not yet. It is guaranteed to be written to disk > sometime, thats what bdflush/update and kswapd are for. Un unmounting the fs > all buffers are flushed, even if you managed to kill your bdflush before.
That's exactly what I was thinking.
Obviously, if [any] computer system crashes, bad things can happen. That was not my point of confusion; rather, I was bewildered because the author seemed to be implying that these kinds of problems could occur *even during normal filesystem operation*. I couldn't figure out how that could be, unless it was due to some kind of bug in the caching code, not a flaw in the design of the filesystem.
> I noted the name of the author in my ignore list ... obviuosly he did not > understand anything!
I'm inclined to agree, especially since elsewhere he refers to ext2 as "the fast and unsafe grandchild" of FFS.
-- Mirian Crzig Lennox Systems Anarchist "There's a New World Order coming every minute. Make mine extra cheese."
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