On Wed, Feb 06, 2008 at 10:04:30AM +0100, Erik Larsson wrote:
> I hope you realize the serious implication of this problem... if ntfs-3g 
> (or indeed any other FUSE file system) doesn't terminate gracefully, it 
> might leave the user's hard drive in an inconsistent state, worst case.
> Has anyone encountered this issue before, and solved it without having 
> an external daemon manage unmounting of file systems?

Hopefully, most any FUSE file system will leave the underlying data in
a consistent state even if the daemon is terminated at a random point
in time. Computers do lose power, operating systems crash, my code
crashes, systems run out of ram, harddrives stop responding, etc, so
it is probably not safe to make the integrity of a user's data
dependent on none of these happening. Fwiw, the default file systems
in Linux, Windows NT, and Mac OS X are all designed to recover should
the operating system software crash.

Unfortunately, it does seem that efficiently achieving this property,
disk consistency under fail stops, for a file system implemented in
userspace is rather difficult. But perhaps the file system/disk
interface that operating systems provide can be improved upon down the
road. (Shameless plug: maybe something like "patches" would help applications?
http://featherstitch.cs.ucla.edu/. Or maybe something else.)

-- 
Chris Frost  |  <http://www.frostnet.net/chris/>
-------------+----------------------------------
PGP: <http://www.frostnet.net/chris/pgpkey.txt>

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"macfuse-devel" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For more options, visit this group at 
http://groups.google.com/group/macfuse-devel?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

Reply via email to