Hi Andreas: > On Sep 17, 2002 11:04 -0700, Hua Zhong wrote: > > Thanks for the reply. Two questions: > > 1. Could you give me a pointer to the patch that flushes ext3 journal > > explicitly? I'd like an enhanced "sync" behavior that flushes > everything to > > the disk. > > This is done implicitly when lilo calls the FIBMAP ioctl. I don't quite understand here. As I understand it the only interaction between lilo (and any bootloader) and the OS is lilo loads OS and that's it. What do you mean by "lilo calls FIBMAP ioctl"? > > 2. Is there a way to sync metadata as well as data? > > It depends on what you mean, precisely. The metadata is "synced" to the > journal. The problem is really that GRUB is ignoring the fact that the > journal exists. If the kernel were to mount the filesystem, or e2fsck > run on it, then the metadata in the journal would be flushed to disk. I mean sync everything to disk so GRUB can see the change after reboot. It cannot be in the journal. > > If this problem cannot be solved, I may have to go back to ext2. Yes it > > takes more time to do fsck but or a 512M flash with 4 > partitions it takes 11 > > seconds which is not that bad - and ext2 is in general more stable and > > faster.... > > > > I'm also wondering how many people are using ext3 on flash. Is there any > > better alternatives (like FAT maybe?) > > You are probably far better off to use JFFS2 or similar - it is a > journaled filesystem explicitly designed for flash devices, so it does > wear leveling and such (otherwise the journal + superblock will quickly > wear out part of the flash). Yeah I am already looking into it. I haven't played with it much. It requires some MTD layers and I assume not everything is in the kernel (?). Currently our flash interface is IDE (and flash is NAND I think). Does it work with such an interface? Thanks. > Cheers, Andreas > -- > Andreas Dilger > http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/ > http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/ > _______________________________________________ Ext3-users@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ext3-users
