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Atomicity under Windows

From: Greg Hudson <ghudson_at_MIT.EDU>
Date: 2002-06-08 21:34:29 CEST

I'm working on the design of a Subversion filesystem back end which
maps directly to the underlying filesystem, instead of going through a
key/value or SQL database. (I don't want to actually discuss the
design here until after Subversion 1.0 is close to finished, to avoid
taking time away from people working on more important stuff. Also,
it might take me a while to complete the design, or I might lose
steam.) It would be nice if the back end could work and be robust
under Windows as well as Unix. I need some information about
atomicity under Windows to inform the design in this respect.

On Unix, you have some basic tools available for local filesystems:

  * fsync() provides the basics of failure atomicity by guaranteeing
    that a file's contents have been flushed to disk. (With some
    fileystems, you may also have to fsync() directories in order to
    make sure that directory entries are flushed to disk; with others,
    fsync()ing a file guarantees that all paths referencing the file
    have been flushed.)

  * rename() is both failure-atomic and concurrency-atomic; either the
    rename has happened or it hasn't. There is no in-between state
    where the target doesn't exist. (You can't get this for
    directories, incidentally.)

  * open() with the O_CREAT|O_EXCL flags will fail if the file already
    exists; you can use this to create unique files or do rudimentary
    locking.

  * fcntl() can create advisory locks on files, when the above two
    approaches aren't sufficient for concurrency atomicity. fcntl()
    locks are convenient because they are automatically cleaned up if
    the locking process dies or the machine reboots. You can also use
    it to do locking over subranges of a file.

(Some of these guarantees degrade or disappear for remote filesystems,
particularly some vintages of NFS. I don't know all the details
there.)

My question is: which of these tools have equivalents or analogs under
Windows, and which don't? And are there fundamentally different tools
you have to use instead?

Thanks.

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Received on Sat Jun 8 21:35:01 2002

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