On Mon, Jul 17, 2000 at 03:59:00PM -0400, Greg Hudson wrote:
> > It is DJB's view that all directory operations (creating, removing,
> > linking, etc.) sould be synchronous, just like BSD does.
>
> For the record, FFS with soft-updates does not guarantee synchronous
> directory operations; you have to open and fsync() the file you just
> moved to be sure the operation has been committed to disk. See
> http://mail-index.netbsd.org/current-users/2000/06/19/0011.html for a
> little more information.
Then I was confused. I assumed FFS was like UFS on Solaris, where you
can "feel" the synchronous directory operations by doing a "rm -rf" of
anything larger than a few files.
> Based on the patch, it sounds like ReiserFS agrees with
> FFS+softupdates in semantics; that is, if you want to ensure that a
> directory operation has completed, you open and fsync the directory
> entry you care about.
But qmail already does this. In fact, it is very careful to do this in
all the places it is necessary. If ReiserFS behaved identically to
FFS+softupdates, it would not need any qmail patches. (I have deleted
the original message which we are discussing, and I don't remember what
exactly it patched)
> This behavior is different from ext2fs, where
> you have to open and fsync the directory containing the entry you care
> about.
Which to me seems to be a more logical mode of operations: if you want
the file data sync'd to disk, call fsync on the file; if you want the
directory, fsync the directory.
--
Bruce Guenter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://em.ca/~bruceg/
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