Miklos Szeredi: > Rollback on failure is an incomplete solution, rollback itself can fail. > And it doesn't protect against machine crashing in the middle of > operation. Maybe you are right. But do you think rollback is unnecessary since it is an incomplete solution? And you might not have read about the approach in aufs, which tries reducing the operations in rollback. (from '[RFC 2/8] Aufs2: structure' in 2009 <http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=123537453514896&w=2>) ---------------------------------------- In aufs, rmdir(2) and rename(2) for dir uses whiteout alternatively. In order to make several functions in a single systemcall to be revertible, aufs adopts an approach to rename a directory to a temporary unique whiteouted name. For example, in rename(2) dir where the target dir already existed, aufs renames the target dir to a temporary unique whiteouted name before the actual rename on a branch and then handles other actions (make it opaque, update the attributes, etc). If an error happens in these actions, aufs simply renames the whiteouted name back and returns an error. If all are succeeded, aufs registers a function to remove the whiteouted unique temporary name completely and asynchronously to the system global workqueue. ---------------------------------------- J. R. Okajima -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html