Re: Linux 2.6.29

[Jeff Garzik]

Mark Lord wrote:
> Ric Wheeler wrote:
> > Mark Lord wrote:
> > > Ric Wheeler wrote:
> ..
> > > The kernel can crash, and the drives, in practice, will still
> > > flush their caches to media by themselves.  Within a second or two.
> >
> > Even with desktops, I am not positive that the drive write cache 
> > survives a kernel crash without data loss. If I remember correctly, 
> > Chris's tests used crashes (not power outages) to display the data 
> > corruption that happened without barriers being enabled properly.
> ..
>
> Linux f/s barriers != drive write caches.
>
> Drive write caches are an almost total non-issue for desktop users,
> except on the (very rare) event of a total, sudden power failure
> during extended write outs.
>
> Very rare.

Heck, even I have lost power on a plane, while a laptop in laptop mode 
was flushing out work.  Not that rare.


> Yes, a huge problem for server farms.  No question.
> But the majority of Linux systems are probably (still) desktops/notebooks.

But it doesn't really matter who is what majority, does it?  At the 
present time at least, we have not designated any filesystems "desktop 
only", nor have we declared Linux a desktop-only OS.

Any generalized decision that hurts servers to help desktops would be 
short-sighted.  Robbing Peter, to pay Paul, is no formula for OS success.

	Jeff



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