*BSD News Article 62038


Return to BSD News archive

Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!paladin.american.edu!gatech!news.mathworks.com!fu-berlin.de!zib-berlin.de!news.tu-chemnitz.de!irz401!uriah.heep!news
From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.os.linux.development.system
Subject: Re: The better (more suitable)Unix?? FreeBSD or Linux
Date: 14 Feb 1996 08:29:25 GMT
Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden
Lines: 23
Message-ID: <4fs6h5$hcg@uriah.heep.sax.de>
References: <4er9hp$5ng@orb.direct.ca> <311250C2.2781E494@public.uni-hamburg.de> <strenDM7Gr4.Cn2@netcom.com> <4f27sc$13a@dyson.iquest.net> <4f4c78$dsb@aurora.romoidoy.com> <strenDMBHHo.311@netcom.com> <hpa.31167ef4.I.use.Linux@freya.yggdrasil.com> <4fdupc$e36@news1.wing.net> <4fiq4k$if8@josie.abo.fi>
Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch)
NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.3
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:14265 comp.os.linux.development.system:17878

mandtbac@news.abo.fi (Mats Andtbacka) writes:

> >: mostly because it really turns out that BSD-style synchronous metadata
> >: updates are slow and buy you very little in terms of data safety, and
> >: can, in fact, be a security hole.

> i believe (though i could be wrong) that the argument goes down these
> lines:
> 
>  - BSD writes metadata synchronously, but data asynch. thus, if the
> box goes down while data is not yet written, you end up with files
> that seem, to the filesystem, OK, whereas they're really garbage.

They always ended up with 0 bytes length for me (or have been trimmed
by the auto-fsck to this value).  Just an observation, not a serious
investigation though.

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)