Is my data checksummed?

tytso at mit.edu tytso at mit.edu
Mon Feb 22 02:41:39 UTC 2010


On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 08:15:30PM -0800, Reza Roboubi wrote:
> What checksumming is done for the actual data?  I know that storage
> devices often do their own checksumming too, but how can I be sure
> my data is integrity checked every time I read it?

If you use disks that support the Data Integrity Field (DIF)
extension, Linux will use it to provide end-to-end data checksum
support.  Otherwise, there are checksums on the disk and between disk
controller and the CPU, but those are obviously not end-to-end
checksums.

Adding data-level checksums is not something that we are planning on
adding to the ext2/3/4 file systems.  BTRFS is the only file system
that has data-level checksums, but it's not yet production ready.

Best regards,

					- Ted




More information about the Ext3-users mailing list