Quoting Jim Crilly <jim@why.dont.jablowme.net>:
On 08/23/07 10:03:24AM -0700, michael@estone.ca wrote:The problem of zeroing files of XFS still exists, however its not some mythical type of corruption. You'll only see it on files recently written to within seconds (say approx 60 secs) of a hard power off. If you can't risk it, or think you may have encounter the odd hard reset, ext3 might be a better choice.Actually it's been fixed as of 2.6.22: http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/faq.html#nulls Of course that doesn't help you if you're using sticking with the kernel shipped with etch.
I'm not so sure its fixed. I just tested with a sid samba box, running 2.6.22 kernel, and XFS filesystem. Connected to it via a WinXP box and copied a word doc file to it. Soft rebooted the samba box to make sure the file was sync'd to hard drive.Re-connected to samba share and opened the word document, added some text lines to it, saved and quit Word, then yanked the power out. Rebooted and re-connected to the samba share again only to find the file full of squares.
Ext3 would have at least retained the original contents of the file.I tested the exact same thing again but waited 60 seconds after saving the file, and then yanked the power out. Upon a boot up, the file was intact and the save worked. So you still have about a 60 second window of newly written files and a power loss for data corruption, unless the program can sync it to disk before that.
Cheers, Mike