Re: ext3-2.4-0.9.4

Lawrence Greenfield
2001-07-31T05:25:39Z

Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2001 22:23:29 -0300 (BRST)
From: Rik van Riel <riel@conectiva.com.br>
[...]
> I would definitely prefer:
>
> lsync(dirpath)
[...]
Nice addition. Easier to use than fsync() - no need to
open the file - and probably easier to implement in the
kernel because this way we'll be handing the whole path
to the kernel, whereas fsync() would have the dubious
task of finding out how this file can be traced all the
way down from the root of the filesystem.

It's not as good as fsync() just doing what it's suppose to do.
You'll force applications that want to issue multiple link()s to issue
multiple lsync()s, forcing the kernel to serialize all of the disk
writes when the application just wants one file (and all of it's
associated filenames) to disk.

Yes, I understand that implementing fsync() so that it syncs all names
to reach the file is difficult. But if you want the best performance,
you don't want to make applications issue multiple calls each of which
force their own synchronous writes.

Not to mention us whiny application writers won't be happy throwing
lsync()s all over the place.

Larry