Wishful thinking [LWN.net]

Wishful thinking

Posted Mar 16, 2009 22:39 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: Wishful thinking by quotemstr
Parent article: Garrett: ext4, application expectations and power management

no, applications _sometimes_ or _mostly_ work without fsync on some OS/filesystem/mount option combinations

that's far from what you are asserting "applications work without fsync already"

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Wishful thinking

Posted Mar 16, 2009 22:44 UTC (Mon) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331) [Link]

You can add those qualifiers to almost any statement. The fact is that these applications are written to assume rename inserts a write barrier, and the vast majority of the time, these applications get what they want. With pre-patch ext4 and XFS, this assumption breaks. The breakage was noticed very quickly after ext4 entered wide use. If these applications' assumptions were so unreliable, we would have been an uproar well before ext4 was released.