Subject: Puzzling questions about FFS
To: None <tech-kern@sun-lamp.cs.berkeley.edu>
From: Kim Andersen <kim@dde.dk>
List: tech-kern
Date: 10/28/1994 17:58:51
There's a never ending discussion going on in comp.os.linux.development
regarding problems and virtues of Linux's ext2fs filesytem and FFS.

One of the things that keeps surfacing is that the synchronous writes of
inodes are wrong, and could lead to security failures.

As I havent studied the code in either file system too closely, I would like
someone to comment on the validity of the statements.

It was written in one article:
>As someone pointed out, the only way to ensure file system integrity is to
>write out first data blocks, then indirect blocks and then the inode. FFS
>does the opposite which is at best useless, at worst wrong.

(This is supposed to be the way linux does it)

How can this model be better then the opposite .
I would think that it mainly were a question of locking the datablocks, 

I must say that i haven't seen any problems with FFS, even when abusing
the file-system eg. removing power during massive writes.

Comments

regards
kim