Asynchronously mounted filesystems?

Matt Alexander wrote:
>
> Does anyone know the history or have additional information on why Linux
> mounts filesystems asynchronously by default? While giving your system a
> speed boost over synchronously mounted filesystems, it would also seem to have
> a lot of potential to cause filesystem damage if the system ever crashed. Is
> there anything special about the ext2 filesystem that makes it immune to this
> problem?

good question!

Unfortunately, I do not have a definitive answer, but do I know of one
vendor that did produce a *NIX that was imune to such crash damage. It
would be interesting to try to hack such into linux and do a preformance
hit comparison. This would be a perfect addition to some of the
microcontroler apps people are trying to develop. One such is an open
problem to develop a direct EIDE - Dos files system interface using a
PIC microcontroler. Insead of Dos you could implement ext2, etc...
Picture plugging a simple extension card into your palm pilot that
allowed you to write directly to those itty-bitty quarter sized disks
and swank out some serious disk space... or a datalogger capable of
driving a 10GB laptop disk and with two or three PIC's to go directly
from sensor to disk... Hmmm... I'm getting more interested by the
moment ;-)

To many ideas, not enought LIFE,


EBo --