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Kernel Hackers On Ext3/4 After 2.6.29 Release

Posted by timothy on from the good-things-come-from-certain-clashes dept.

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.'"

5 of 316 comments (clear)

  1. OK, then... *WHO* is the official ext3 "moron"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Quote from Linus:

    "...the idiotic ext3 writeback behavior. It literally does everything the wrong way around - writing data later than the metadata that points to it. Whoever came up with that solution was a moron. No ifs, buts, or maybes about it."

    In the interests of fairness... it should be fairly easy to track down the person or group of people who did this. Code commits in the Linux world seem to be pretty well documented.

      How about ASKING them rather than calling the Morons?

    (note: they may very well BE morons, but at least give them a chance to respond before being pilloried by Linus)

    TDz.

    1. Re:OK, then... *WHO* is the official ext3 "moron"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Torvalds exactly knows who it is and most people following the discussion will probably know it, too.
      Also, there has been a fairly public discussion including a statement by the responsible person in question.

      Not saying the name is Torvalds attempt at saving grace. Similar to a parent of two children saying, I don't know who did the mess, but if I come back, it better be cleaned up.

      Yes, Mr. Torvalds is fairly outspoken.

    2. Re:OK, then... *WHO* is the official ext3 "moron"? by houghi · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Knowing the humor that Linus has, it could be himself.

      --
      Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
  2. Re:lkml.org server is slashdotted. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Well this is just my meta comment. I'll be writing my real comment later...

    You forgot to include a link to the comment you'll be writing later.

  3. Re:lkml.org server is slashdotted. by linuxrocks123 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Actually, Linus was, as he sometimes is, completely clueless. He's unaware of the fact that filesystem journaling was *NEVER* intended to give better data integrity guarantees than an ext2-crash-fsck cycle and that the only reason for journaling was to alleviate the delay caused by fscking. All the filesystem can normally promise in the event of a crash is that the metadata will describe a valid filesystem somewhere between the last returned synchronization call and the state at the event of the crash. If you need more than that -- and you really, probably don't -- you have to do special things, such as running an OS that never, ever, ever crashes and putting a special capacitor in the system so the OS can flush everything to disk before the computer loses power in an outage.

    --
    vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.