Hi, On Fri, 2003-02-21 at 06:29, Robert Liu wrote: > We have developed a Linux software RAID5 technology, called SR5, which > guarantees that block writes to the disk array are ordered even if disk > write back cache is enabled. That only addresses one part of the problem. Preserving disk write ordering will guarantee that the data is not corrupt after a reboot. However, it will still break applications that need to know when their data is hard on disk. Consider things like sendmail(8). Incoming mail is ack'ed only when it has been fsync()ed to disk. At that point, the sending spool is told it can delete the old copy of the email. If you crash at this point, that's OK --- the fsync has guaranteed that the new copy of the email is correct. If you enable write-behind transparently, then on a power-cycle at this point, you risk losing the email. The same applies to all sorts of applications where fsync or O_SYNC is used to synchronise data persistence between hosts. Content management systems, databases, mail and news spoolers and so on all rely on this. Cheers, Stephen _______________________________________________ Ext3-users@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ext3-users
