Not getting it right

Posted Mar 14, 2009 12:17 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (guest, #15091)
In reply to: Ts'o: Delayed allocation and the zero-length file problem by drag
Parent article: Ts'o: Delayed allocation and the zero-length file problem

The "other applications get it right with fsync" part is a bit of a fallacy. When you save a document in an application (be it a word processor or a mail client) you really want it to be safe, and it is normally not an issue to wait a few seconds. IOW the user is expected to wait for disk activity because we have been trained this way, so we are willing to accept this trade-off.

But there are other programs doing file operations all the time, and nobody wants to wait a few seconds for them. Most notably background tasks like the operating system or a desktop environment. Is it reasonable to expect all of them to do something which potentially slows the system to a crawl on other filesystems, just to play safe with the newcomer ext4?