Re: [PATCH v3] introduce sys_syncfs to sync a single file system

[Dave Chinner <david-FqsqvQoI3Ljby3iVrkZq2A@public.gmane.org>]

On Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 09:29:17PM -0700, Sage Weil wrote:
> On Mon, 14 Mar 2011, Indan Zupancic wrote:
> > Everyone seems to want to add this new syncfs, but it's not even defined 
> > what it does. "Same as sync, but only on one fs" is IMHO not good 
> > enough, because sync's behaviour is pretty badly documented, and that's 
> > a system call.
> 
> How about the man page below?  I tried to avoid the somewhat antiquated 
> implementation specific terminology in the sync(2) man page.
> 
> I think adding this functionality into sync_file_range(2) is forcing 
> unrelated functionality into an existing interface; sync_file_range 
> operates on _files_, not an entire file system.  With each API addition it 
> is more important to make the interface simple and intuitive than to 
> minimize the size of our patches.  IMO that's why a new syscall is 
> preferable to, say, an equivalent ioctl.
> 
> Thanks-
> sage
> 
> 
> .TH SYNCFS 2 2011-03-13 "Linux" "Linux Programmer's Manual"
> .SH NAME
> syncfs \- commit cached file system state to stable storage
> .SH SYNOPSIS
> .B #include <unistd.h>
> .sp
> .B void syncfs(int fd);
> .SH DESCRIPTION
> .BR syncfs ()
> flushes any cached data modifications to the file system containing the 
> file referenced by the file descriptor
> .I fd
> to stable storage (usually a disk).  This includes the results of any
> file modifications or other file system operations that have completed
> prior to the call to
> .BR syncfs(2).
> This is similar to 
> .BR sync(2),
> but will commit changes for only a single file system instead of all
> mounted file systems.
> .SH ERRORS
> This function is always successful.

Perhaps we should consider propagating errors out to the user
application rather than discarding them in kernel and pretending we
can't ever have a write error?

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
david-FqsqvQoI3Ljby3iVrkZq2A@public.gmane.org