On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 11:19:01AM +0100, Jan Kara wrote: > On Mon 28-11-11 18:32:18, Mikulas Patocka wrote: > > - skipping sync on frozen filesystem violates sync semantics. > > Applications, such as databases, assume that when sync finishes, data were > > written to stable storage. If we skip sync when the filesystem is frozen, > > we can cause data corruption in these applications (if the system crashes > > after we skipped a sync). > Here I don't agree. Filesystem must guarantee there are no dirty data on > a frozen filesystem. Ext4 and XFS do this, ext3 would need proper > page_mkwrite() implementation for this but that's the problem of ext3, not > freezing code in general. If there are no dirty data, sync code (and also > flusher thread) is free to return without doing anything. Consider, during a 'create a snapshot' operation: I/O flow: application -> filesystem -> LV -> disk dm lockfs is issued by LVM. When this returns, the filesystem should be locked i.e. not issue any further I/O to the LV. (But if it did happen to issue I/O, it wouldn't be a problem, as it would just get queued by dm and have no impact on the snapshot creation operation.) The application is still running and might still be issuing writes to the filesystem and might itself issue 'sync'. But a 'sync' would only be meaningful for already-completed writes and the lockfs process should have already seen that they have hit disk. So a sync issued while a device is locked can always be skipped. Have I missed something in this reasoning, Mikulas? Alasdair -- 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
