* Ric Wheeler: > Note that even without MD raid, the file system issues IO's in file > system block size (4096 bytes normally) and most commodity storage > devices use a 512 byte sector size which means that we have to update > 8 512b sectors. Database software often attempts to deal with this phenomenon (sometimes called "torn page writes"). For example, you can make sure that the first time you write to a database page, you keep a full copy in your transaction log. If the machine crashes, the log is replayed, first completely overwriting the partially-written page. Only after that, you can perform logical/incremental logging. The log itself has to be protected with a different mechanism, so that you don't try to replay bad data. But you haven't comitted to this data yet, so it is fine to skip bad records. Therefore, sub-page corruption is a fundamentally different issue from super-page corruption. BTW, older textbooks will tell you that mirroring requires that you read from two copies of the data and compare it (and have some sort of tie breaker if you need availability). And you also have to re-read data you've just written to disk, to make sure it's actually there and hit the expected sectors. We can't even do this anymore, thanks to disk caches. And it doesn't seem to be necessary in most cases. -- Florian Weimer <fweimer@xxxxxx> BFK edv-consulting GmbH http://www.bfk.de/ Kriegsstraße 100 tel: +49-721-96201-1 D-76133 Karlsruhe fax: +49-721-96201-99 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
