Description of the Journaling topology

Gary Thorpe gathorpe79 at yahoo.com
Wed Dec 29 20:35:02 PST 2004


Rahul Siddharthan wrote:
I'm no expert but I thought the traditional case was fast recovery to
a consistent filesystem state (avoiding a long fsck), not recovery of
buffered data or fast writing of buffered data to disk.  I'm pretty
sure ext3, for example, with its default async mount, is very
susceptible to losing data.  ufs+softupdates most certainly can lose a
lot of buffered data.
Rahul
A buffer is not a journal, its a buffer. Journaling file systems put the 
journal ON DISK--if power is lost you replay the journal FROM DISK to 
recover consistent file system. This scheme will not allow that because 
the journal is kept in memory. You can use it for transparent backup, 
but how useful is it for recovery from crashes/power loss? It seems like 
 transaction based VFS mirroring, but you cannot replay the journal if 
the system crashes or otherwise reboots unexpectedly.






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