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Kernel Hackers On Ext3/4 After 2.6.29 Release
microbee writes "Following the Linux kernel 2.6.29 release, several famous kernel hackers have raised complaints upon what seems to be a long-time performance problem related to ext3. Alan Cox, Ingo Molnar, Andrew Morton, Andi Keen, Theodore Ts'o, and of course Linus Torvalds have all participated. It may shed some light on the status of Linux filesystems. For example, Linus Torvalds commented on the corruption caused by writeback mode, calling it 'idiotic.'"
Mmmh, must be a big problem
We are the people our parents warned us about.
this is what I get from http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/3/24/460:
"The server is taking too long to respond; please wait a minute or 2 and try again."
Considering that there is only one comment on this slashdot thread, that means that most people will comment without actually reading TFA.
Like me... :-)
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
The server is running linux.
Tell us what you really think there Linus.
~I went home today knowing I made someone cry!~
they may very well BE morons, but at least give them a chance to respond before being pilloried by Linus
He's following Ext3 writeback semantics. You'll have to wait for a patch to fix his behaviour.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
I think he's sad because he never got that job at Microsoft he always wanted.
Maybe only a hug from Bill Gates would solve his problem.
nonsense. we can always use a good pillorying
That's why I'm a OpenBSD developer as well... I like the abuse and scorn that Theo throws at me.
It's good to see that Linus is becoming more like Theo. What's the quote: "that which doesn't kill me only makes me stronger"
Well, its not ironic. It would be ironic if the ext3/4 authors lost their code in a crash because of the order that the data was written.
It is that simple, but the GPL explicitly forbids to change the write order of file system operations without the written consent of the author who lives currently in a hut on an isolated Pacific island.
Yep, we urgently need some kind of killer FS for Linux...
Oh, wait...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Is the person responsible going to pull a classic political step-down where they resign "in order to spend more time with their family"?
Maybe it was Hans Reiser? Sure the guy is locked up in San Quentin, but nobody knows how to hack a filesystem to bits better than Reiser. Bada ba ching! Thank you, thank you... I'll be here all night.
You specifically have to choose writeback mode in the full knowledge that the datablocks will almost certainly be written after the metadata journal.
I think Ted Tso etc are probably perfectly aware of how it works.
Except that ext4 loses data in ordered mode for exactly the same reason, and we had a big fuss about that the last few weeks, because *someone* (cough) said that it's the application developers fault for not fsync()-ing.
You must have missed Linus's memo:
To: Samuel J. Palmisano, IBM Business Guy
From: Linus Torvalds, Super Genius
Dear Sam:
As you know, I've been trying to get a decent file system into Linux for a while. Let's face it, none of these johnny-come-lately open-source arseholes can write a file system to save their life; the last one to have a chance was Reiser, and I really don't want him hanging around here even if we can spring him; he creeps me out. And your guys are no better. JFS? It is to laugh. Sun has one called ZFS, but they are being utter dicks about licensing it. Since licensing seems to be more in your purview than mine, I thought you might be able to help me out. I can't help but notice that in this recession, IBM is doing relatively good and Sun's stock is in the crapper. Perhaps the easiest thing to do would be to just pick up the whole company. Just a thought
-- Linus
Whoah, the first time I scanned that I read: "ext3 was merged to the mainline kernel in 2001. ext3 was created in 2005"
my reaction was, "Wow, well that makes sense..."
Maybe Linus should just fixit instead of whining about it. It's open source, dammit.
Yeah, the metadata was written first, then only ext3 was actually created.
A filesystem that writes the metadata before the actual data, is a "Duke Nukem Forever" Filesystem.