A Detailed Example
By using an example, we explore different crash scenarios that can result in many problems on the on-disk file system.
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To kick off our investigation of journaling, let’s look at an example. We’ll need to use a workload that updates on-disk structures in some way. Assume here that the workload is simple: the append of a single data block to an existing file. The append is accomplished by opening the file, calling lseek()
to move the file offset to the end of the file, and then issuing a single 4KB write to the file before closing it.
Let’s also assume we are using standard simple file system structures on the disk, similar to file systems we have seen before. This tiny example includes an inode bitmap (with just 8 bits, one per inode), a data bitmap (also 8 bits, one per data block), inodes (8 total, numbered 0 to 7, and spread across four blocks), and data blocks (8 total, numbered 0 to 7). Here is a diagram of this file system:
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