ecryptfs team mailing list archive

[Theodore Ts'o <tytso@xxxxxxx>]

There have been a lot of the same arguments (and more than few
misconceptions) that have been made over and over again in this thread,
so I've created a rather long blog post, "Don't fear the fsync!", which
will hopefully answer a number of the questions people have raised:

      http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/03/15/dont-fear-the-fsync/

It will probably be more efficient to attach comments to that post than
to add more comments to this (already extremely long) Launchpad bug,
since many of the comments are discussing philosophical issues, and as
some folks have already pointed out, patches to deal with forcing out
blocks on rename (just like ext3 does) have already been backported into
the Ubuntu kernel, and will be in 2.6.30.   I understand that btrfs will
also be adding an flush-on-rename patch in 2.6.30.  (Note that XFS at
this point only has flush-when-closing-previously-truncated-file; which
yes, I implemented after Eric Sandeen from Red Hat pointed out XFS had
done.   However, XFS does not, as of this date, flush-blocks-on-rename
behaviour --- this was my innovation, to reward applications that were
at least making an attempt to do things right --- although given the
notoriety of this discussion, I wouldn't be surprised if Eric or some
other XFS developer also adds this to XFS for 2.6.30).

However, if you are an application writer, please, please, PLEASE read
my blog post "Don't fear the fsync!".

-- 
Ext4 data loss
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/317781
You received this bug notification because you are a member of eCryptfs,
which is subscribed to ecryptfs-utils in ubuntu.

Status in “ecryptfs-utils” source package in Ubuntu: Invalid
Status in “linux” source package in Ubuntu: Fix Released
Status in ecryptfs-utils in Ubuntu Jaunty: Invalid
Status in linux in Ubuntu Jaunty: Fix Released

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