Re: [PATCH] log replay should not overwrite newer ondisk inodes

[David Chinner <dgc@xxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Sep 04, 2007 at 04:05:06PM -0700, Shailendra Tripathi wrote:
> Hi,
>      Can someone explain how not checking the flushiter can losse 
> filesize updates.
> Let me the take the case mentioned here in the fix statement:
> 
> a. Clustered inode create -  flush iter - X( 0)
> b. size update  --> flush iter --> Y
> 
> X and Y will always hold as: X <= Y, that is, it is not possible to have 
> X >Y (unless size update is non -transactional. As far as I know, size 
> update is always transactional.)

Size updates are not transactional. They are accidentally logged in
other transactions (e.g. truncates) but size updates due to data
writes are never logged. When we write an inode, we take the latest
in memory size and write it to disk without logging that change
so we can't rely on log recovery to get it right simply by replaying
transactions.

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
Principal Engineer
SGI Australian Software Group