xfsprogs

[Net Llama!]

On Thu, 12 Aug 2004, Bruce Marshall wrote:
> On Thursday 12 August 2004 10:53 am, Kurt Wall wrote:
> > In a 0.8K blaze of typing glory, M.W. Chang wrote:
> > > > What are you trying to fix?  I don't think journaling file systems need
> > > > fsck.
> > >
> > > I have once had ext3 corruption problem with my harddisk,
> > > demanding manual intervention. SO I thought the same thing
> > > MIGHT happen to xfs. I am not sure how superior xfs could be
> > > when compared to ext3.
> >
> > Significantly superior. In the two years I've been running XFS, I've lost
> > exactly *no* data.
> >
> > > thanks. I was just curious about the strange behaviour of fsck.xfs. :)
> >
> > Yup.
> >
> > KUrt
>
> I would like to say the same, Kurt, and I also have been running XFS for about
> two years.   But recently, in a T-storm, the power took about a 3 sec hit and
> my wife's machine went down.  The next day, she couldn't open Kmail and
> mozilla was all screwed up.  It had all of my bookmarks and none of hers and
> other things were weird.  (and I don't use her machine but I do have a login
> on it)
>
> Not to say this couldn't happen with any FS but it *can* happen to XFS.  I
> guess XFS does a lot of memory caching of data and if you catch it at just
> the wrong time, it could well cause problems...

This is primarily due to two factors:
0) XFS only journals metadata, not the data itself
1) Some apps cache config changes in memory rather than writing them to
disk immediately.  So if a chanage is made to a config file, then the copy
on disk isn't consistant until the app is shutdown.  I've seen this happen
with XFS with mozilla.   There have also been alot of reports of it
happening with some KDE apps on the XFS list, but someone reported it
being fixed in KDE very recently.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lonni J Friedman                                netllama at linux-sxs.org
Linux Step-by-step & TyGeMo                  http://netllama.ipfox.com