ecryptfs team mailing list archive

[Kai Krakow <kai@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

To conclude everything:

No distribution should probably ship with Ext4 as default because Ext3's
behaviour was broken and everyone relies on it. And it should not be
shipped with Ext4 as default for the same reasons while people are
warned to use XFS: Potential data loss on crashes.

So as this means never-ever install XFS on a laptop we should now also
say never-ever install Ext4 on a laptop. So what future will Ext4 have?
Of course a bright one because everyone will use it anyway. Because Ext#
was ever used as default and will ever be used. But in my eyes Ext4
should share the same future as XFS, ReiserFS or similar: Don't use it
because it's bad in the one or other way.

These may be hard words but it would be logic consequence. KDE actually
has a fix for this (KDE_EXTRA_FSYNC=1) but it's not on by default
because of Ext3's broken behaviour and bad performance impact when doing
that. So Theodore is true: applications need fixing (putting aside the
commit-ordering bug which I still consider a bug and will be fixed in
.30? Not sure). But how to get out of this dilemma? One cannot use Ext4
before the applications are fixed. But applications won't be fixed until
Ext4 is rolled out and actually many people experience this data-loss.
In the meantime one way or the other: Newbies won't be impressed: Either
the software will be slow or it will loose data - either is bad.

Actually Ext3's bad performance was why I switched to ReiserFS. But
ReiserFS has bad performance in SMP systems. So I switched to XFS. And
now there will be a second player having the same issues: Ext4.
Hopefully a way out of this dilemma will be found fast.

-- 
Ext4 data loss
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/317781
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Status in “ecryptfs-utils” source package in Ubuntu: Invalid
Status in “linux” source package in Ubuntu: Fix Committed
Status in ecryptfs-utils in Ubuntu Jaunty: Invalid
Status in linux in Ubuntu Jaunty: Fix Committed

Bug description:
I recently installed Kubuntu Jaunty on a new drive, using Ext4 for all my data.

The first time i had this problem was a few days ago when after a power loss ktimetracker's config file was replaced by a 0 byte version . No idea if anything else was affected.. I just noticed ktimetracker right away.

Today, I was experimenting with some BIOS settings that made the system crash right after loading the desktop. After a clean reboot pretty much any file written to by any application (during the previous boot) was 0 bytes.
For example Plasma and some of the KDE core config files were reset. Also some of my MySQL databases were killed...

My EXT4 partitions all use the default settings with no performance tweaks. Barriers on, extents on, ordered data mode..

I used Ext3 for 2 years and I never had any problems after power losses or system crashes.

Jaunty has all the recent updates except for the kernel that i don't upgrade because of bug #315006

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: linux-image-2.6.28-4-generic 2.6.28-4.6
ProcCmdLine: root=UUID=81942248-db70-46ef-97df-836006aad399 ro rootfstype=ext4 vga=791 all_generic_ide elevator=anticipatory
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.28-4.6-generic
SourcePackage: linux