On Wed, 20 Jul 2005 18:25:22 +0200 (MEST) Szakacsits Szabolcs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Please note, that unless power goes down or the box crashes, flushes don't > matter for consistency but they matter a lot for how the kernel's I/O > scheduler can optimize reads and writes.
I 100% agree. But remember that "power goes down or the box crashes" is the main concern about what is designated as a "dangerous" operation. A software can't debug hard problems, an in the general case can't be proven bug free. During the last year I've seen 2 Parti**** Mag** completly trashing NTFS file systems on laptops, and I've had a power outage at home because of a big fire near the main electric line of the area where I live. In the first 2 cases, this was a crash and a battery problem, and I believe PM doesn't operate in ordered mode. In the latter, I discovered that my ReiserFS did a good job. Complete program interruption is a probable case of potential data loss, and trying to handle it is the way to try to decrease the probability of data loss. So I come to a proposition for Parted. After all as everything is a probability question, so maybe there could be an "I am a courageous man I want to take extra risks to try to go faster and to let me doing generic partition moves" option ? If the speed gain is important this also might in some cases decrease the risk associated with the power outage type of failure, as going faster means a smaler probability of black out during the shorter operation. (indeed the craziest idea I just had is to calculate the optimal sync rate to minimize the probability of data loss given a set of parameters modelising the software environement, but this is probably more a PHD subject than something implementable during spare time :-) Cheers, Guillaume _______________________________________________ Bug-parted mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-parted
