On Tue, 12 Aug 2008, Ron Mayer wrote:
Really old software (notably 2.4 linux kernels) didn't send cache synchronizing commands for SCSI nor either ATA;
Surely not true. Write cache flushing has been a known problem in the computer science world for several tens of years. The difference is that in the past we only had a "flush everything" command whereas now we have a "flush everything before the barrier before everything after the barrier" command.
Matthew -- "To err is human; to really louse things up requires root privileges." -- Alexander Pope, slightly paraphrased