“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.“Let’s look at how these inconsistencies could be introduced to
a filesystem…”