Re: corrupt pages detected by enabling checksums

On 5/10/13 1:32 PM, Simon Riggs wrote:
> The timing
> window between the write and the sync is negligible and yet I/O would
> need to occur in that window and also be out of order from the order
> of the write, which is unlikely because an I/O elevator would either
> not touch the order of writes at all, or would want to maintain
> sequential order to avoid head movement, which is what we want. I
> guess we should add here "...with disks, maybe not with SSDs".

It's not really safe to make any assumptions about I/O elevators. 
Reordering gets done from the perspective of the last item written. 
When the previous write was at the logical end of the disk, it can just 
as easily re-order a queue of writes in the complete reverse order they 
were issued in.

The only way you can ever get a useful guarantee is when an fsync 
returns completion.  Writes can effectively go out in a completely 
random order until that point.  All you can rely on is throwing up a 
stop sign that says "tell me when all of them are done".  In between 
those, you have no idea of the ordering.

-- 
Greg Smith   2ndQuadrant US    greg@2ndQuadrant.com   Baltimore, MD
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