On Fri, Oct 20, 2006 at 10:08:29PM +0100, M J Fleming wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 20, 2006 at 01:37:05PM -0700, Jason Thorpe wrote:
> > - Contiguously allocated from within the file system's free space.   
> > Pros: simple, fast.  Cons: hard to enable journaling on a pre-existing  
> > file system if the free space is heavily fragmented.
> > 
> > - Allocated from file system free space as contiguously as possible,  
> > but no different than any other file.  Pros: easy to enable journaling  
> > on pre-existing file systems because it will work regardless of how  
> > the free space is laid out.  Cons: have to use BMAP to translate  
> > journal offset -> location on disk.
> > 
> 
> Somebody will know better than me but, if the log area isn't contiguous
> I would have thought that it would impact transaction I/O so much that the
> benefit of metadata-consistency wouldn't be worth it.

I wonder about this, too.  I'm thinking that what Wasabi did, generalized
a little bit, might not be such a bad idea at all -- if the code simply
always used _another disk device_ for the log, that log could be placed
after the FFS (by putting it in a partition after the FFS) as Wasabi did,
before the FFS (by putting it in a partition before the FFS), as might be
desirable for performance reasons, or even on another disk entirely (e.g.
a solid-state device, or a logical disk entirely resident within the
battery-backed memory of a hardware RAID unit, which some such units
support for exactly this purpose).

There is some logistical hassle -- you have to whack mount and a few
other interfaces to understand that a filesystem might have more than
one device associated with it, or somehow make that self-describing --
but it might be worth it, particularly since using an external journal
would also make it possible to journal or unjournal existing filesystems.

-- 
  Thor Lancelot Simon	                                     tls@rek.tjls.com

  "We cannot usually in social life pursue a single value or a single moral
   aim, untroubled by the need to compromise with others."      - H.L.A. Hart