ext4: enable barriers by default
I can't think of any valid reason for ext4 to not use barriers when
they are available; I believe this is necessary for filesystem
integrity in the face of a volatile write cache on storage.
An administrator who trusts that the cache is sufficiently battery-
backed (and power supplies are sufficiently redundant, etc...)
can always turn it back off again.
SuSE has carried such a patch for ext3 for quite some time now.
Also document the mount option while we're at it.
Signed-off-by: Eric Sandeen <sandeen@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Mingming Cao <cmm@us.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/ext4.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/ext4.txt
index 560f88d..0c5086db 100644
--- a/Documentation/filesystems/ext4.txt
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/ext4.txt
@@ -139,8 +139,16 @@
Setting it to very large values will improve
performance.
-barrier=1 This enables/disables barriers. barrier=0 disables
- it, barrier=1 enables it.
+barrier=<0|1(*)> This enables/disables the use of write barriers in
+ the jbd code. barrier=0 disables, barrier=1 enables.
+ This also requires an IO stack which can support
+ barriers, and if jbd gets an error on a barrier
+ write, it will disable again with a warning.
+ Write barriers enforce proper on-disk ordering
+ of journal commits, making volatile disk write caches
+ safe to use, at some performance penalty. If
+ your disks are battery-backed in one way or another,
+ disabling barriers may safely improve performance.
orlov (*) This enables the new Orlov block allocator. It is
enabled by default.