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Ext4 filesystem hits Android, no need to fear data loss (ars technica)Ext4 filesystem hits Android, no need to fear data loss (ars technica)Posted Dec 28, 2010 3:49 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)In reply to: Ext4 filesystem hits Android, no need to fear data loss (ars technica) by rich0 Parent article: Ext4 filesystem hits Android, no need to fear data loss (ars technica)
Any filesystem that doesn't guarantee the ordering of operations in the typical "write and then rename over the old file" case is effectively unusable in the desktop case, and as far as I know no significant distribution released with ext4 as the default and with those bugs still present. As long as you're not modifying files in place then you should be able to manage without fsync in pretty much every case other than explicit saves.
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Ext4 filesystem hits Android, no need to fear data loss (ars technica) Posted Dec 28, 2010 12:37 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
On a side note, with BTRFS the write-then-rename without fsync is a safe operation.
Looks like this is guaranteed behavior on Linux now. :)
Well, is's quite explicit decision... Posted Dec 28, 2010 13:37 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] This is true for more then year: see here. Filesystem developers don't like to support such semantic, but they all agree that "the application developers outnumber us" so it's simpler to explicitly add such guarantee rather then try to educate said application developers.
Well, is's quite explicit decision... Posted Dec 28, 2010 17:23 UTC (Tue) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
It's not that fielsystem developers are outnumbered by app developers. It's that forcing app writers to do an fsync will simply KILL performance as pretty much every app will forever be hanging on file-system access.
Plus the fact that on some fs types you need the fsync and it's cheap, on others you don't need it and it's costly. The app should not need to modify its behaviour depending on which file system it's running on.
Cheers,
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