ACID-compliant filesystem (was:Re: [CentOS] Re: centos] 4.4 upgrade problems)

On Tuesday 05 September 2006 22:35, R P Herrold wrote:

This bug hinges, very much, on the non-atomic nature of 'hot' system updates, and the fact that the yum-needed, sqlite-maintinaed cache of pacakges got munged half way through, to reproduce.

Sounds like a database type issue; that is, it could be demonstrated that a multiversion concurrency control (MVCC) mechanism, similar to the PostgreSQL backend, for the whole filesystem, would help this sort of thing. That is, a filesystem on ACID. (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability: the magic mantra of database management).

A real transactional filesystem would allow truly atomic system updates. But, of course, there are definite downsides to that.