ext3 zerofree option and RedHat back port?

Ron Yorston rmy at tigress.co.uk
Wed Sep 24 14:35:32 UTC 2008


Theodore Tso <tytso at mit.edu> wrote:
>I just searched my sent-mail archives for the last 5 years, and I
>can't find any references to "zerofree" previous to this mail thread.
>Maybe I commented about them under some other name.
>
>Having quickly looked at the ext3 patch here:
>
>       http://osdir.com/ml/file-systems.ext3.user/2006-09/msg00026.html

Your response is in the same thread:

   http://osdir.com/ml/file-systems.ext3.user/2006-09/msg00031.html

Unless that was some other Theodore Tso.

>..the big thing I will note is that if you crash after a file is
>deleted, but before the journal transaction is committed, the file may
>end up being cleared but not deleted.

Indeed, that was the concern last time.  The ext3 patch hasn't changed
significantly since then because, truth be told, I don't entirely
understand journalling and was unable to fix it up.  The ext2 patch now
writes out the zeroed blocks immediately, which may or may not help.

The latest versions of the patches are available on my website:

   http://intgat.tigress.co.uk/rmy/uml/sparsify.html

Ron




More information about the Ext3-users mailing list