Guest post by Linux kernel 3.8 has been released. This release includes support in Ext4 for embedding very small files in the inode, which greatly improves the performance for these files and saves some disk space. There is also a new Btrfs feature that allows to replace quickly a disk, a new filesystem F2FS optimized for SSDs, support of filesystem mount, UTS, IPC, PID, and network namespaces for unprivileged users, accounting of kernel memory in the memory resource controller, journal checksums in XFS, an improved NUMA policy redesign and, of course, the removal of support for 386 processors. Many small features and new drivers and fixes are also available. Here’s the full list of changes.
I hope this question isn’t out of place here: Was the EXT4 corruption bug ever definitely fixed, and if so, in what version?
Which one? I have never heard of one. There was one in btrfs, right, and btrs doesn’t have a fsck, which makes corruption to its metadata much worse, but ext4 has been remarkably stable and reliable.
Edited 2013-02-19 22:17 UTC
Regarding BTRFS, it still is surprisingly unstable, like e.g. just recently I tried to copy a few files from my N900 to my server running BTRFS and it resulted in the BTRFS – kernel module crashing every single time and me having to reboot the system to get it useable again. Such an odd bug, but I seem to keep hitting bugs with BTRFS all the time and I’m starting to wonder if I should just switch to something else.
Try the real deal, i.e. ZFS.
FYI, BTRFS does have a fsck.
https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/FAQ#When_will_Btrfs_have_a_f…
no one gives fsck for btrfs tho.
The bug was fixed in late October, so I would assume releases since then are patched.
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=…
Yes, the October corruption thing (http://lwn.net/Articles/521022/) is gone.
Actually, an interesting read is how people, were too panicky about it: http://lwn.net/Articles/521803/
Yeah, this was the one I was referring too. Thanks, and glad to see it’s fixed.
Ted Tso, creator of EXT4 explains that lot of Linux filesystems are unsafe, because of the hunt for performance instead of stabilty
http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?36507-Large-HDD-SSD-Linux…
“In the case of reiserfs, Chris Mason submitted a patch 4 years ago to turn on barriers by default, but Hans Reiser vetoed it. Apparently, to Hans, winning the benchmark demolition derby was more important than his user’s data. (It’s a sad fact that sometimes the desire to win benchmark competition will cause developers to cheat, sometimes at the expense of their users.)…We tried to get the default changed in ext3, but it was overruled by Andrew Morton, on the grounds that it would represent a big performance loss, and he didn’t think the corruption happened all that often (!!!!!) — despite the fact that Chris Mason had developed a python program that would reliably corrupt an ext3 file system if you ran it and then pulled the power plug “
I wait for the service pack.
hahaha…oh wait, that wasn’t funny.