Yeah, Ted's speaking filesystemdeveloperese there, but if you read other comments about the difference between ext3 and ext4 there's enough context to decipher. What he's basically saying is that at rename time they will now force the kernel to *decide* which disk blocks the data will eventually end up on (that's what "allocation" means), and then it's a pre-existing rule that before the metadata transaction commits (i.e., that's when the rename will hit disk) you have to write out all "allocated" blocks to disk.