Re: writing file to disk: not as easy as it looks

From: Mikulas Patocka <mikulas@artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz>
To: Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: Pavel Machek <pavel@suse.cz>, Chris Friesen <cfriesen@nortel.com>,
	kernel list <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
	aviro@redhat.com
Subject: Re: writing file to disk: not as easy as it looks
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2008 18:43:18 +0100 (CET)	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0812031840420.25439@artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20081203164240.GA30610@mit.edu>

> On Wed, Dec 03, 2008 at 09:46:40AM +0100, Pavel Machek wrote:
> > Yes. fsync() seeems surprisingly high on Rusty's list of broken
> > interfaces classification ('impossible to use correctly').

BTW where is that list.

> To be fair, fsync() was primarily intended for making sure that the
> data had been written to disk, and not necessarily as a way of making
> sure that write errors would be properly reflected back to the
> application.  As you've pointed out, it's not really adequate for that
> purpose.
> 
> 						- Ted

Well, what else do you want to use for databases? (where crashing the 
whole computer makes less damage than pretending that transaction was 
committed while it wasn't).

Mikulas