Is data=journal safer for Ext4 as opposed to data=ordered?

Yes, data=journal is the safest way of writing data to disk. Since all data and metadata are written to the journal before being written to disk, you can always replay interrupted I/O jobs in the case of a crash. It also disables the delayed allocation feature, which may lead to data loss.

The 3 modes are presented in order of safeness in the manual:

  1. data=journal
  2. data=ordered
  3. data=writeback

There's also another option which may interest you:

commit=nrsec    (*) Ext4 can be told to sync all its data and metadata
                    every 'nrsec' seconds. The default value is 5 seconds.

The only known caveat is that it can become terribly slow. You can reduce the performance impact by disabling the access time update with the noatime option.


This thread is super old, but still relevant.

We wanted to merge many tiny writes on a MySQL database, running as a VM under KVM using Ceph RBD images.

Guest: CentOS 6 VM's /etc/fstab:

/dev/sda1               /                       ext4    defaults,usrjquota=aquota.user,grpjquota=aquota.group,jqfmt=vfsv0,noatime,nodiratime,commit=60,data=journal,discard 1 1

The '/dev/sda' device (1 TiB) is in a compressed erasure coded NVMe pool, with a relatively tiny (128 MiB) dedicated journal device in a triple replicated NVMe pool.

Herewith the commands we used in a rescue environment:

Detach the journal:

tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/sda1;

Check the file system for inconsistencies:

fsck.ext4 -f -C 0 /dev/sda1;

Obtain block size:

tune2fs -l /dev/sda1;

Format dedicated journal device (WARNING):

Minimum journal size should be 1024 * block size (we use 128 MiB to be safe)

Set block size to match that of /dev/sda1

mke2fs -O journal_dev -L root_journal /dev/sdb1 -b 4096;

Attach the dedicated journal device to the file system:

tune2fs -j -J device=LABEL=root_journal /dev/sda1;

MySQL settings:

[mysqld]
innodb_old_blocks_time = 1000           # Prevent buffer pool pollution. Default as of MySQL 5.6
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 24576M        # MySQL Cache
innodb_log_buffer_size = 128M           # 25% of log_file_size
innodb_log_file_size = 512M             # 25% of the buffer_pool (no, not really)
query_cache_size = 128M                 # Query Cache
table_cache = 512                       # Make it large enough for: show global status like 'open%';
#mysqltuner.pl:
innodb_flush_method = O_DSYNC           # Don't validate writes. MySQL 5.6+ should use O_DIRECT
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 2      # Flush MySQL transactions to operating system cache
join_buffer_size = 256K
thread_cache_size = 4
innodb_buffer_pool_instances = 16
skip-innodb_doublewrite

Tags:

Ext4

Recent Posts