Re: On Linux Filesystems

On Mon, Aug 11, 2003 at 10:58:18PM -0400, Christopher Browne wrote:
> 1.  Nobody has gone through any formal proofs, and there are few
> systems _anywhere_ that are 100% reliable.

I think the problem is that ext2 is known to be not perfectly crash
safe.  That is, fsck on reboot after a crash can cause, in some
extreme cases, recently-fscynced data to end up in lost+found/.  The
data may or may not be recoverable from there.

I don't think anyone would object to such a characterisation of ext2.
It was not designed, ever, for perfect data safety -- it was designed
as a reasonably good compromise for most cases.  _Every_ filesystem
entails some compromises.  This happens to be the one entailed by
ext2.

For production use with valuable data, for my money (or, more
precisely, my time when a system panics for no good reason), it is
always worth the additional speed penalty to use something like
metadata journalling.  Maybe others have more time to spare.

> perhaps even including performance metrics for *BSD.  That, not
> Linux-baiting, is the answer...

I didn't see anyone Linux-baiting.

A

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