Re: scsi vs ide performance on fsync's

Jens Axboe
2001-03-07T20:16:43Z

On Wed, Mar 07 2001, Stephen C. Tweedie wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 07, 2001 at 07:51:52PM +0100, Jens Axboe wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 07 2001, Stephen C. Tweedie wrote:
> >
> > My bigger concern is when the journalled fs has a log on a different
> > queue.
>
> For most fs'es, that's not an issue. The fs won't start writeback on
> the primary disk at all until the journal commit has been acknowledged
> as firm on disk.

But do you then force wait on that journal commit?

> Certainly for ext3, synchronisation between the log and the primary
> disk is no big thing. What really hurts is writing to the log, where
> we have to wait for the log writes to complete before submitting the
> commit write (which is sequentially allocated just after the rest of
> the log blocks). Specifying a barrier on the commit block would allow
> us to keep the log device streaming, and the fs can deal with
> synchronising the primary disk quite happily by itself.

A barrier operation is sufficient then. So you're saying don't
over design, a simple barrier is all you need?

--
Jens Axboe