[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Neal H. Walfield) writes: > > Disk hardware guarantees that a sector write can always be completed > > even if the power goes out partway through. That means that writing a > > single sector *is* always atomic. > > The size of a single sector does not necessarily equal the size of of > a disk block.
If the metadata is properly designed, this doesn't matter. The ext2fs format actually has a bug in which it permits directory entries to cross sector boundaries (ufs does not), which can result in unrepairable inconsistencies if there is a crash in the middle of writing such a pair of blocks. But there is no theoretical problem with getting it right.
