rcombs

I wrote a very basic test program to verify this: #include <stdint.h> #include <unistd.h> #include <fcntl.h> int main() { uint32_t val = 0; int fd0 = open("test1", O_RDWR | O_CREAT); write(fd0, &val, sizeof(val)); close(fd0); while (val < 100000) { uint32_t val2 = 0; int fd1 = open("test1", O_RDWR | O_CREAT); int fd2 = open("test2", O_RDWR | O_CREAT); read(fd1, &val2, sizeof(val2)); close(fd1); val++; val2++; fd1 = open("test1", O_RDWR | O_CREAT); write(fd1, &val2, sizeof(val2)); write(fd2, &val, sizeof(val)); close(fd1); close(fd2); } return 0; } On a normal disk, the resulting "test1" and "test2" files will always contain identical 4-byte integers (100000). We can see this with a hex dump: $ cat test1 test2 | hexdump -C 00000000 a0 86 01 00 a0 86 01 00 |........| However, if the move program is run on test1 while the program runs, we can desynchronize: $ echo /mnt/cache/[path]/test1 | move -d 2 $ cat test1 test2 | hexdump -C 00000000 9f 86 01 00 a0 86 01 00 |........| Note that the two files now differ by 1. Losing writes can result in a lot of unexpected behaviors; I think it might be responsible for corruption I've seen in files downloaded by Transmission, as well as in sqlite databases (I saw corruption in my Plex Media Server database last night that appears consistent with lost writes, and happened about the same time as I ran the mover script). I'm not sure what the best solution for this problem is, as I'm not familiar with the internals of the mover program or the shfs ioctl it uses. One route could be to do the copy to a tmp file on the destination drive, then while holding an internal lock on the file as exposed by fuse, verify that it hasn't changed since the copy started, and only then take the place of the source. Alternately, while a file is being moved, shfs could expose it to userspace such that reads come from the source file, but writes go to both the source and the destination.