[Dovecot] Best filesystem?

Stan Hoeppner stan at hardwarefreak.com
Mon Jan 31 01:07:22 EET 2011


Timo Sirainen put forth on 1/30/2011 4:40 PM:
> On Sun, 2011-01-30 at 16:13 -0600, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
>>>>> be, but it still gives you 0 byte files, so make sure you have a good UPS
> ..
>> "Q: Why do I see binary NULLS in some files after recovery when I unplugged the
>> power?
> 
> 0 byte files != NULL bytes in files. My guess is it's the same problem
> as described in
> http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/03/12/delayed-allocation-and-the-zero-length-file-problem/

Yes, very similar Timo.

To be clear, for any subscribers who haven't followed all of the various
filesystem and data security threads, with any modern *nix system, you WILL lose
data when power fails.  How much depends on how many writes to disk were in
flight when the power failed, and how one has their RAID controller and
inside-the-disk caches configured, whether using barriers, etc.

I believe I mentioned this when discussing the merits of XFS and ZFS with Frank,
who stated Solaris/ZFS were immune to this, to which I called BS.  They aren't
immune, as Ted T'so clearly states.  For those who don't know, Ted T'so is an
MIT PH.D., is the creator of EXT2/3, and is to this day an active Linux kernel
hacker/developer on filesystems and storage drivers.

-- 
Stan




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