Published at LXer:

Atomicity is a property of an operation either to succeed or fail completely. Disks assure atomicity at the sector level. This means that a write to a sector either goes through completely or not at all. But when an operation spans over multiple sectors of the disk, a higher-level mechanism is needed. This mechanism should ensure that modifications to the entire set of sectors are handled atomically. Failure to do so leads to inconsistencies. This document talks about the implementation of the Journaling Block Device in Linux.

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