Other use cases [LWN.net]

Other use cases

Posted Mar 4, 2026 19:06 UTC (Wed) by TheJH (subscriber, #101155)
In reply to: Other use cases by danielkza
Parent article: The ongoing quest for atomic buffered writes

though such a file manager could also, after finishing a copy operation, fsync() all the copied files, or if that's too much, syncfs() the entire filesystem, before indicating to the user that the operation has completed...

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Other use cases

Posted Mar 4, 2026 20:11 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Ideally, though, the file manager wants to report progress to the user - which means that you want notifications for fsync progress, not just write progress. That pushes you in the direction of sync_file_range, too - you'd end up submitting a series of sync_file_range(fd, offset, len, SYNC_FILE_RANGE_WAIT_BEFORE | SYNC_FILE_RANGE_WRITE | SYNC_FILE_RANGE_WAIT_AFTER) operations to get you progress, then an fsync to sync the file metadata, then either a syncfs or a set of fsyncs on directories to ensure that the file is safely on disk.