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

Sat Sep 9 17:43:50 UTC 2006
Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>

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.
-- 
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu