> Is there a way (in 2.2.8) to turn on journalling or synchronous writing
> of metadata without turning on synchronous writing of the data. What
> are the pros/cons of doing this. I have seen this discussed a long time
> ago in an thread somewhere in which Linus was debating this with FreeBSD
> folks but can't find that thread now. It seems to me he said that Linux
> supportted it but that it was turned off by default because it was "the
> wrong thing to do". To my mind, however, It could be good for a new
> server in which the files in the news spool filesystem are numerous
> small files, none of which are really all that critical individually.
> Thanks for any input. fsck on large mail servers can be a real pain.
Linux does not support synchronous metadata, except as a side-effect of
completely synchronous filesystems. Stephen Tweedie (sct@redhat.com) is
working on journalling extensions to ext2 and the vfs/block device layers,
but I doubt you'll see them before mid-2.3. They're described in a paper
at ftp://ftp.uk.linux.org/pub/linux/sct/fs/jfs/.
Stephen - could some of the API be exported to userspace for use by things
like databases which want similar transaction support?
Matthew.
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