9.04, ext4 and the open-write-close-rename debacle

Patrick Goetz pgoetz at mail.utexas.edu
Wed May 6 16:14:47 UTC 2009


I'm not sure if this is the right forum for this question, but I've been 
unable to find a definitive answer to this question.

Probably everyone is familiar with the lengthy discussion that has 
revolved around the first stable implementation of ext4, namely that all 
data in a file can be zeroed out (including the original copy) in the 
event of a system crash even for the presumably safe 
open-write-close-rename paradigm; e.g.
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/317781?comments=all 


In his blog, Ted Ts'o comments that the 2.6.30 patch for this has been 
backported by Canonical to 9.04 (I think somewhere in the comments to 
this entry)
http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/03/12/delayed-allocation-and-the-zero-length-file-problem/

Can anyone confirm that if I start formatting file servers with 
9.04-based ext4 partitions users won't be faced with losing dozens of 
recently saved files if the server happens to crash?





More information about the Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list