precise characterization of ext3 atomicity

From: Hans Reiser
Date: Thu Sep 04 2003 - 09:22:40 EST


Is it correct to say of ext3 that it guarantees and only guarantees atomicity of writes that do not cross page boundaries?

I am trying to define the difference between "Atomic Reiser4" and ext3, as it seems to be a frequently asked question, and I am thinking of saying something like:

Reiser4 allows you to define a set of up to A separate arbitrary filesystem operations (where A by default is not allowed to exceed 64) that are to be committed to disk atomically. Every individual filesystem operation is atomic without the need to specify it.

By contrast, ext3 only guarantees the atomicity of a single write that does not span a page boundary, and it guarantees that its internal metadata will not be corrupted even if your applications data is corrupted after the crash.

--
Hans


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