Re: [PATCH 0/3] mm: Swap checksum

[Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>]

On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 6:28 AM,  <Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, 27 May 2010 00:31:44 +0900, Minchan Kim said:
>> On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 07:21:57AM -0300, Cesar Eduardo Barros wrote:
>> > far as I can see, does nothing against the disk simply failing to
>> > write and later returning stale data, since the stale checksum would
>> > match the stale data.
>>
>> Sorry. I can't understand your point.
>> Who makes stale data? If any layer makes data as stale, integrity is up to
>> the layer. Maybe I am missing your point.
>> Could you explain more detail?
>
> I'm pretty sure that what Cesar meant was that the following could happen:
>
> 1) Write block 11983 on the disk, checksum 34FE9B72.
> (... time passes.. maybe weeks)
> 2) Attempt to write block 11983 on disk with checksum AE9F3581. The write fails
> due to a power failure or something.
> (... more time passes...)
> 3) Read block 11983, get back data with checksum 34FE9B72. Checksum matches,
> and there's no indication that the write in (2) ever failed. The program
> proceeds thinking it's just read back the most recently written data, when in
> fact it's just read an older version of that block. Problems can ensue if the
> data just read is now out of sync with *other* blocks of data - instant data
> corruption.

Oh, doesn't normal disk support atomicity of sector write?
I have been thought disk must support atomicity of sector write at least.

AFAIK, other device(ex, nand device by FTL) supports atomicity of sector write.

-- 
Kind regards,
Minchan Kim

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