EXT4 Lets Us Down, There Goes Our R600/700 Mesa Tests

[bugmenot]

For all those that are screaming "BACKUPS", please remember that backups only make sense if the ratio

(Probability of data loss * Cost of data loss) / (Cost of backup)

is greater than one. So it really comes down to how likely you think a hardware or software failure is. Reasonable assumptions to me are 1% failure probability and maybe a half hour to set up the backups, so this means that if it takes less than 50 hours of actual work to run the tests, you'd be wasting your time making backups.

[Michael]

Right in time for 2.4.0 I finished off a phoromatic.upload-results option that allow any test results to be uploaded to a Phoromatic account, if the account holder has enabled "Allow Phoromatic test systems to upload unscheduled test results."

[RobbieAB]

It's on the same hardware, it's not a back-up. You should know that.

[gentoofu]

Backups are just a waste of resources. EXT4 developers need to code right.

[Michael]

lmao

nice "backup" scheme you got going there...

Usually it serves its purpose fine and worked well back when the problem with EXT4 was the empty files on crashes.

[Naib]

The Phoronix Test Suite even keeps backup copies of the XML test results from previous runs in a separate file to fend off data loss problems like that, but alas they were stored in the same directory.

lmao

nice "backup" scheme you got going there, this also on a stripped RAID as well

FYI I just had a powercut today and my home server (which is EXT4 for the last year) nicely handled it, no UPS either

[Melcar]

Well that sucks. Results would have been interesting.

[energyman]

Sad to hear all that work is gone. Well, at least you can file a bug report.

But: there is an ooold rule.

Backups.

Do them on physically separate data carriers.

I learned that about 8 years ago during a HW failure. And I was happy that I had at least 50% of my data off that drive. I was in a backup process when it fubared

And: Don't use unfinished file systems. I keep away from any of the new ones, may they have performace better, I do not care. Data safety is much more important. One can use them when they're ready.
I just find it hilarious the see the many bugs and problems ext4 causes while it was announced to be the greatest since readily cut bread. Wasn't it iirc some of the devs of etx4 that were agains the ?ber-Filesystem reiser4 to go into kernel? And that's some years ago.

Anyway.
Hope you'll find the time to redo the benchmarks.

not only that - all that people who attacked and blocked reiser4 because of 'layer violations' don't have problems with btrfs that does the same but much, much worse.

[energyman]

that is what you get trusting extX devs declaring their stuff 'stable'.

ext4 should rot in the staging section of the kernel.

[eb40]

That's a pity!
One question: you're blaming ext4. How do you know it is not caused by some other unrelated bug?