Soliloquies

In the light of recent “Ext3 fsync” problem related discussions happened in the Linux Kernel mailing list involving many experts in the field, there has been quite a few improvements. There were some patches from Theodore T’so – the Ext4 maintainer, Jens Axboe – the block layer maintainer, Chris Mason – the Btrfs developer et al. An overview of the discussion can be found at LWN.net, here.

Ext3 filesystem by default mounts the disk in a “data=ordered” mode. It basically means, the actual data will be written on the disk before the metadata is written on the disk. But this causes long delays while using the “fsync()” system call. An improvement suggested usually is to change the mount option to “data=writeback“. Whenever I install a Fedora system, one of the first things I used to speedup the file operations is to change the Ext3 mount option to “writeback“. But it has its own share of problems too. After a crash, it is very likely to have corrupted data than in “ordered” mode. Risking the data integrity for performance, I myself ran into issues – sometimes system used to lock up when I use a composite manager like Compiz or Kwin, and I will have to use Alt-SysRq to reboot. After the crash, while logging back, some of the GNOME settings would be lost or slightly corrupted.

Well, Chris Mason has proposed another mode, which can be enabled by a new mount option called “data=guarded” which takes care of most of the issues with performance and data integrity. The version 3 of the patchset has been posted yesterday. And it looks very probable that Linus will pull it for inclusion into kernel 2.6.30, which is in the rc2 state now.

Update: The first 2 patches in the patch series (of 3 patches), which are adding infrastructure for the “data=guarded” mode has been merged by Linus. The 3rd patch which adds the functionality has been tested by Mike Galbraith and found issue of data corruption, for which the root cause was quickly found by Chris Mason and fixed.

I first heard from ”Bourgeoisie” (an old friend and a geek) of Michael K. Johnson. And only later I came across “Linux Kernel Hacker’s Guide”.

I’m personally very happy to see a patch again from him on linux-kernel list after a long time.

Yeah, yeah. M$ has released the next generation filesystem for large capacity flash media (iow, the portable USB sticks/external hard disks) and claims to offer “seamless interoperability”. Well, lets sit down and dissect.

It brings back the memories of struggling to mount a NTFS partition my friends had, and smiling a futile attempt to tell them that “Ugh, NTFS isn’t supported yet”. It was not long back. We got NTFS readonly support later, and I remember searching and installing the Kernel module to mount partitions of the dual-booting machines in our lab.

We got reliable NTFS write support with ntfs-3g much later, IIRC by 2006.

And the story repeats.

But no, there’s already an experimental driver for exFAT, thanks to OGAWA Hirofumi. It is reported to work well, but there are issues. Still, he had to hack the image created by Vista to create that driver.

Will there be a “non-sign-your-life-away spec” open to the developers, ye preachers of interoperability?