The Fedora team has announced the Fedora 11 beta release. It comes packed with new features, such as Ext4 as the default filesystem, Nouveau driver by default, kernel mode setting on Intel, ATI and Nvidia drivers, many virtualization improvements, IBus input method, GCC 4.4, and much more.
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Member since:2005-07-24
If ext4's current default config is truly robust, that's great. I'm very excited about ext4. But I would be interested in how you would relate your observations to the quote, below, from Ted's blog. If you could satisfactorily resolve that discrepancy, then I would probably be satisfied. Even happy. :-)
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Another solution is a set of patches to ext4 that has been queued for 2.6.30 merge window. These three patches (with git id’s bf1b69c0, f32b730a, and 8411e347) will cause a file to have any delayed allocation blocks to be allocated immediately when a file is replaced. This gets done for files which were truncated using ftruncate() or opened via O_TRUNC when the file is closed, and when a file is renamed on top of an existing file. This solves the most annoying set of problems where an existing file gets rewritten, and thanks to the delayed allocation semantics, that existing file gets replaced with a zero-length file. However, it will not solve the problem for newly created files, of course, which would have delayed allocation semantics.
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The bolding, above, is mine, of course.
Edited 2009-03-31 23:07 UTC
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-06
Newly created files having delayed allocation didn't actually result in zero length files in my tests nor was it the problem originated stated in bug report. My tests were simply to copy a large ISO file and pull the power within 10 seconds and run md5sum on it. It worked out fine. Of course, I might be testing the wrong thing.
Member since:2005-07-20
I don't see the problem.
If you lose power, you lose data that hasn't been written to disk yet.
This is different how? It isn't different at all!
Ext4 may default to 60 seconds instead of 5 but that is tunable.
Windows has the same issue with NTFS when you go into the control panels and enable advanced performance. It also lets you set a checkbox for "yes I have battery backup, go more faster."
I've lost entire directories to NTFS with those settings enabled when plugging a USB device made the system freeze.
I guess what Linux users need is hmm, some way to choose what filesystem they want to run? That would be an amazing idea! Why has no one thought of it?
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Member since:
2005-07-06
If you can actually produce zero length files as you describe, I would be interested. I know noone who has in practise managed to do that yet and yes, I tried pulling power and crashing the system deliberately a few times while writing large amount of data.