> From: Brandon Allbery [mailto:[email protected]]
> 
> On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 1:54 PM, Edward Ned Harvey (lopser)
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> I agree, except, that "usable != clean" is irrelevant.  The whole point of the
> journal is that your filesystem doesn't *need* to be clean.  Any part of the 
> FS
> that isn't clean, by definition, you are not using.  As soon as you use it, it
> becomes clean.
> 
> This sounds like a severe misunderstanding of how journaling works to me. It
> is not, in fact, a magic wand that fixes filesystems on the fly; it is a tool 
> to try
> to avoid corruption and to speed up bringing a filesystem up to date. And,
> poorly implemented and applied with the mentality you're showing, it is
> quite good at covering up serious corruption until it is far too late to fix 
> it.

No.  What you said sounds like a misunderstanding.  The journal is used to 
systematically log the intent to make all changes which could possibly result 
in filesystem corruption, if the change were to fail before completion.  
Therefore, at a later time, all corruption that could possibly have been 
previously introduced is immediately detectable and undoable on the fly.

Correct.  It's not a magic wand.  It's a logical deterministic wand.

"poorly implemented" is the main thing that makes your paragraph sound like a 
misunderstanding.  The system administrator doesn't need to do anything to 
implement journaling.  You just install the OS, including a journaling 
filesystem (ext3, ext4, and others) and now your filesystem is journaling.  You 
have to trust that the kernel and filesystem code developers released a robust 
and reliable product.  They are the implementers.

Also, "covering up corruption until it's too late" seems to demonstrate a 
misunderstanding.  You're talking about headlight fluid.
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