[ ... ] >>> write barriers will ensure journal and thus filesystem >>> integrity in a crash/power fail event. They do NOT guarantee >>> file data integrity as file data isn't journaled. Not well expressed, as XFS barriers do ensure file data integrity, *if the applications uses them* (and uses them in exactly the right way). The difference between metadata and data with XFS is that XFS itself will use barriers on metadata at the right times, because that's data to XFS, but it won't use barriers on data, leaving that entirely to the application. >>> No filesystem (Linux anyway) journals data, only metadata. >> That's not true, is it? ext3 and ext4 support journal=data. They do, because they journal blocks, which is not generally a great choice, but gives the option to journal data blocks too more easily than other choices. But it is a very special case that few people use. Also, there are significant issues with 'ext3' and 'fsync' and journaling: http://lwn.net/Articles/328363/ «There is one other important change needed to get a truly quick fsync() with ext3, though: the filesystem must be mounted in data=writeback mode. This mode eliminates the requirement that data blocks be flushed to disk ahead of metadata; in data=ordered mode, instead, the amount of data to be written guarantees that fsync() will always be slower. Switching to data=writeback eliminates those writes, but, in the process, it also turns off the feature which made ext3 seem more robust than ext4.» On a more general note, journaling and barriers are sort of distinct issues. The real purpose of barriers is to ensure that updates are actually on the recording medium, whether in the journal or directly on final destination. That is barriers are used to ensure that data or metadata on the persistent layer is current. The purpose of a journal is not to ensure that the state on the persistent layer are *current*, but rather *consistent* (at a lower cost than synchronous updates), without having to be careful about the order in which the updates are made current. The updates are made consistent by writing them to the log as they are needed (not necessarily immediately), and then on recovery the order gets sorted out spatially. Currency does not imply consistency (if the updates are made current in some arbitrary order) and consistency does not imply currency (if the recording medium is kept consistent but updates are applied to it infrequently). The BSD FFS does not need a journal because it is designed to be very careful as to the order in which updates are made current, and log file systems don't aim for spatial currency. > And btrfs supports COW (as does nilfs2) with "transactions", > which should/could be similar? Not quite. They are more like "checkpoints", that is alternate root inodes that "snapshot" the state of the whole filetree at some point. These are not entirely inexpensive, and as a result as I learned from a talk about some recent updates about the BSD FFS: http://www.sabi.co.uk/blog/12-two.html#120222 COW filesystems like ZFS/BTRFS/... need to have a journal too to support 'fsync' in between checkpoints. BTW there are now COW versions of 'ext3' and 'ext4', with snapshotting too: http://www.sabi.co.uk/blog/12-two.html#120218b The 'freeze' features of XFS does not rely on snapshotting, it relies on suspending all processes that are writing to the filetree, so updates are avoided for the duration. As the XFS team have been adding or planning to add various "new" features like checksums, maybe one day they will add COW to XFS too (not such an easy task when considering how large XFS extents can be, but the hole punching code can help there). -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
