Re: XFS worth it?

[Thomas Steffen <steffen.list.account@gmail.com>]

On 4/16/05, Brian D. Winters <brianw-debian@pteranodon.org> wrote:
> 1) mozilla truncates the "old" file
> 2) mozilla writes the "new" file
>    a) XFS writes the metadata allocating space for the data and
>       indicating the size of the new file
>    b) XFS writes the data to the allocated space

Yep, and I filed a bug report with mozilla (rather added to an
existing one), because I think that mozilla should call sync/fsync
before it considers perfs.js actually written.

> Having defended the design choice to death, I will say that find it
> really annoying that the file exists and is of non-trivial length,
> just full of zeros.

Yep. I would expect the situation to be detectable, and then the file
should just be deleted. That should solve the problem in most cases.

> Why would it decay?

Because of software aging, of course. Yes, "bit rot" is a nice visual for it. 

> Hmmm.  My gut feeling
> is that there is significant community interest that someone would
> pick up the slack, but that may just be wishful thinking.  

My feeling is that there are about enough filesystems to choose from,
and people (Linus) would just drop it.

That said, I am kind of looking forward to reiserfs4. It sounds pretty
amazing, and as soon it is somewhat stable, I will give it a try. But
especially on amd64 and with no real backup solution I don't want to
do that too early :-)

Thomas