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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: ktempfile
From:       Lubos Lunak <l.lunak () suse ! cz>
Date:       2007-10-18 17:47:40
Message-ID: 200710181947.40736.l.lunak () suse ! cz
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On Thursday 18 of October 2007, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> Em Thursday 18 October 2007 16:07:57 Jaison Lee escreveu:
> > If KConfig could me
> > be made to sync() in the background this issue goes away. Is someone
> > willing to look into this?
>
> Even if you do it in a thread, the whole system syncs. It's not a question
> of whether the GUI is responsive or not -- it's a question of whether
> there's a lot of disk I/O.
>
> In the ideal world, I wouldn't recommend syncing at all: if you have a
> power loss, your data is corrupted and we can't do much about it. But I do
> remember lots of complaints by users in bugs.kde.org about this issue,
> which is probably why the sync was introduced in the first place.

 Does somebody remember those (the commit is from Waldo and without any bug 
number reference :( )? Were there complains from somebody else than XFS 
users?

> What I don't know is why our config files are more susceptible to
> corruption than other files. Is it the way we save (KSaveFile: write,
> atomically rename)?

 If this is more or less XFS-only, then according to the Ubuntu link Ossi has 
posted XFS is very vulnerable to this problem with write+rename because of 
preferring metadata writes or whatever is the reason exactly. Of course, 
before Waldo did the change it was all our fault again and the kernel was 
perfect :-/.

/me is still waiting for the filesystem kernel developer to come back from 
vacation

 BTW, an opinion of two other kernel developers (that don't have any specific 
fs knowledge) is that our response to users complaining about losing data 
this way should be telling them to kiss their data good bye and buy UPS or 
use a filesystem where it works if they don't like it.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
--------------------------------------------------------------
SUSE LINUX, s.r.o.   e-mail: l.lunak@suse.cz , l.lunak@kde.org
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Czech Republic       http//www.suse.cz
 
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