On Seg, 2008-04-21 at 19:40 +0200, Andi Kleen wrote: > > Is there a reason why this isn't being done other than performance? > > One reason against it is that in many (but not all) setups to guarantee > reaching the platter you have to disable the write cache, and at least > for consumer level hard disks disk vendors generally do not recommend > doing this because it significantly lowers the MTBF of the disk. I understand that, but if the disk/storage doesn't support flushing the cache, I would expect fsync() to return EIO or ENOTSUP, I wouldn't expect it to ignore my request and risk losing data without my knowledge.. I know fsync() also flushes dirty buffers, but IMHO even if it flushes the buffers it'd be better to return an error if a full sync wasn't being done rather than returning success and misleading the application. Anyway, sorry if this has been discussed before, I should take a look at the archives.. Thanks, Ricardo -- Ricardo Manuel Correia Lustre Engineering Sun Microsystems, Inc. Portugal Phone +351.214134023 / x58723 Mobile +351.912590825 Email Ricardo.M.Correia@xxxxxxx -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
