From: Andrew Morton Subject: Re: [CALL FOR TESTING] Make Ext3 fsck way faster [2.6.24-rc6 -mm patch] Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2008 03:04:41 -0800 Message-ID: <20080115030441.a0270609.akpm@linux-foundation.org> References: <200801140839.01986.abhishekrai@google.com> <20080114163412.83a8b18d.akpm@linux-foundation.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: Abhishek Rai , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, rohitseth@google.com, linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org Return-path: Received: from smtp2.linux-foundation.org ([207.189.120.14]:49641 "EHLO smtp2.linux-foundation.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750768AbYAOLEb (ORCPT ); Tue, 15 Jan 2008 06:04:31 -0500 In-Reply-To: <20080114163412.83a8b18d.akpm@linux-foundation.org> Sender: linux-ext4-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: I'm wondering about the real value of this change, really. In any decent environment, people will fsck their ext3 filesystems during planned downtime, and the benefit of reducing that downtime from 6 hours/machine to 2 hours/machine is probably fairly small, given that there is no service interruption. (The same applies to desktops and laptops). Sure, the benefit is not *zero*, but it's small. Much less than it would be with ext2. I mean, the "avoid unplanned fscks" feature is the whole reason why ext3 has journalling (and boy is that feature expensive during normal operation). So... it's unobvious that the benefit of this feature is worth its risks and costs?