@Theo: would it be hard to implement something like I suggested, ie storing rename backup metadata for crash recovery? I think in the discussion on your blog someone says that reiserfs already does this via 'save links' (comment 120).
Alternatively, if there were a barrier to all renames instead of just ones that overwrite an existing file, would that stop the zero-length files issue, ie make the file system consistent in the event of a crash? I imagine that this would only impact on performance for applications that create very large files and then rename them before the data is written to disk, which seems a very unusual case.
@Theo: would it be hard to implement something like I suggested, ie storing rename backup metadata for crash recovery? I think in the discussion on your blog someone says that reiserfs already does this via 'save links' (comment 120).
Alternatively, if there were a barrier to all renames instead of just ones that overwrite an existing file, would that stop the zero-length files issue, ie make the file system consistent in the event of a crash? I imagine that this would only impact on performance for applications that create very large files and then rename them before the data is written to disk, which seems a very unusual case.