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Oracle Adds Data-integrity Code To Linux Kernel
jazir1979 writes "ZDNet is reporting that Oracle has added code to the Linux kernel for ensuring data integrity. The code has been developed in partnership with Emulex and was recently accepted into the 2.6.27 kernel release." According to the article, "The code adds metadata to data at rest or in transit, to monitor whether that data has been corrupted. It helps make sure that I/O operations are valid by looking at that metadata — which acts as verification information — exchanged during data transmissions."
Oh my god! Not news from October. That was going on two months ago. Everyone knows everything that happened two months ago. What were the editors thinking? Fire them immediately. Let's all go to digg or reddit or myspace where they don't do things like post things that are almost two months old. PANIC PANIC PANIC!!!
Wow, just let other people read it and go on about your business not caring.
Integrity is a security principle, and that is the sense that they're using the word in the summary. It's pretty much the only definition of the word that makes sense in a computing context. More precisely, we're talking about confidence that the data stored in the system is the same as the data retrieved at a later time. The only difference between this and a more cryptographic sense of the word is that this doesn't attempt to guard against malicious attacks if an adversary had offline access to the disk. (Or so I presume, having not RTFA'd).
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
That LWN writeup is far better too though, TFA is terrible. LWN makes it clear that this adds device checksum support, i.e. if your SATA drive supports adding checksum data to blocks this patch will enable that functionality.
Nick