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authorPatrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>2022-03-11 09:58:59 (GMT)
committerJunio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>2022-03-15 20:30:58 (GMT)
commitbc22d845c4328f5bd896d019b3729f776ad4be4c (patch)
treea7f0f27f3b40768a35e7b91825245d3d9512b1c5 /refs/files-backend.c
parent00997924001f3d8a07510613ab44d16c0a9b2883 (diff)
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core.fsync: new option to harden references
When writing both loose and packed references to disk we first create a lockfile, write the updated values into that lockfile, and on commit we rename the file into place. According to filesystem developers, this behaviour is broken because applications should always sync data to disk before doing the final rename to ensure data consistency [1][2][3]. If applications fail to do this correctly, a hard crash of the machine can easily result in corrupted on-disk data. This kind of corruption can in fact be easily observed with Git when the machine hard-resets shortly after writing references to disk. On machines with ext4, this will likely lead to the "empty files" problem: the file has been renamed, but its data has not been synced to disk. The result is that the reference is corrupt, and in the worst case this can lead to data loss. Implement a new option to harden references so that users and admins can avoid this scenario by syncing locked loose and packed references to disk before we rename them into place. [1]: https://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/03/15/dont-fear-the-fsync/ [2]: https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/FAQ (What are the crash guarantees of overwrite-by-rename) [3]: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/Documentation/admin-guide/ext4.rst (see auto_da_alloc) Signed-off-by: Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Diffstat (limited to 'refs/files-backend.c')
-rw-r--r--refs/files-backend.c1
1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/refs/files-backend.c b/refs/files-backend.c
index f59589d..6521ee8 100644
--- a/refs/files-backend.c
+++ b/refs/files-backend.c
@@ -1787,6 +1787,7 @@ static int write_ref_to_lockfile(struct ref_lock *lock,
fd = get_lock_file_fd(&lock->lk);
if (write_in_full(fd, oid_to_hex(oid), the_hash_algo->hexsz) < 0 ||
write_in_full(fd, &term, 1) < 0 ||
+ fsync_component(FSYNC_COMPONENT_REFERENCE, get_lock_file_fd(&lock->lk)) < 0 ||
close_ref_gently(lock) < 0) {
strbuf_addf(err,
"couldn't write '%s'", get_lock_file_path(&lock->lk));