linux-kernel - Re: the " 'official' point of view" expressed by kernelnewbies.org regarding reiser4 inclusion

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Message-ID: <20060731221716.GA16440@merlin.emma.line.org>
Date:	Tue, 1 Aug 2006 00:17:16 +0200
From:	Matthias Andree <matthias.andree@....de>
To:	Rudy Zijlstra <rudy@...ons.demon.nl>,
	Adrian Ulrich <reiser4@...nkenlights.ch>,
	vonbrand@....utfsm.cl, ipso@...ppymail.ca, reiser@...esys.com,
	lkml@...productions.com, jeff@...zik.org, tytso@....edu,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, reiserfs-list@...esys.com
Subject: Re: the " 'official' point of view" expressed by kernelnewbies.org regarding reiser4 inclusion

Jan-Benedict Glaw schrieb am 2006-07-31:

> > Massive hardware problems don't count. ext2/ext3 doesn't look much better in
> > such cases. I had a machine with RAM gone bad (no ECC - I wonder what
> 
> They do! Very much, actually. These happen In Real Life, so I have to
> pay attention to them. Once you're in setups with > 10000 machines,
> everything counts. At some certain point, you can even use HDD's
> temperature sensors in old machines to diagnose dead fans.
> 
> Everything that eases recovery for whatever reason is something you
> have to pay attention to. The simplicity of ext{2,3} is something I
> really fail to find proper words for. As well as the really good fsck.
> Once seen a SIGSEGV'ing fsck, you really don't want to go there.

The point is: If you've written data with broken hardware (RAM, bus,
controllers - loads of them, CPU), what is on your disks is
untrustworthy anyways, and fsck isn't going to repair your gzip file
where every 64th bit has become a 1 or when the battery-backed write
cache threw 60 MB down the drain...

Of course, an fsck that crashes is unbearable, but that doesn't apply to
"broken hardware" failures. You need backups with a few generations to
avoid massively losing data.

-- 
Matthias Andree
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