Re: scary ext2 filesystem question

Tim Smith (tzs@tzs.net)
Fri, 25 Dec 1998 09:45:37 -0800 (PST)


On 25 Dec 1998, Mirian Crzig Lennox wrote:
> Unfortunately, the author goes into no deeper detail about the
> danger, and so the above text remains just vague enough to give me a
> gnawing case of FUD. Would some knowledgeable person on this list
> care to enlighten me? I'm particularly concerned about how an
> application could potentially become confused and/or crash because of
> this.

Try a DejaNews search. This comes up fairly often in Linux vs BSD
flamewars. It appears to me that the situation is as follows:

1. The Berkeley system is theoretically better than ext2 from a data
integrety point of view, and ext2 is better from a performance point
of view.

2. In practice, ext2 is extremely robust. It doesn't lose data nearly as
often as one would theoretically expect it to. In fact, it loses data
about as often as the theoretically much superior FFS loses data (e.g.,
both get hosed so infrequently as to make a comparision impossible).

3. File system theory is not complete.

4. When experiment and theory conflict, experiment wins.

--Tim Smith

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/