Garrett: ext4, application expectations and power management

> Ah ok. But renaming files should always have an fsync in it.. shouldn' it. I mean thats a point where you WANT the new data not the old data.

Well it depends. If your data is not that important then it's not that important. If the data your dealing with is not that important then losing the latest changes isn't going to be the end of the world. Who cares really if Epiphany missed that last bit of history in the last 60 seconds or so? Who cares that I just set the default font to Arial in the last 30 seconds? Just as long as my preferences and history is not wiped out completely and is corrupted to the point were nothing will run without me going in and cleaning up the bad files.

It's a trade-off.

If the data is more important then good battery life, good disk performance, well laid out data on the block device, or the long life of your flash drive, (etc), then running fsync() all the time is what you want.

Some data is that important, other data not so much.

If all data was equaly critically important then it's just better to run in "sync" mode all the time and just take the hit.

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And remember that in Linux system with stable drivers and decent hardware then running fsync() before a rename gains you almost nothing.