Re: Linux 2.6.29

Jeff Garzik
2009-03-31T20:51:34Z

Jens Axboe wrote:
> Another problem is that FLUSH_CACHE sucks. Really. And not just on
> ext3/ordered, generally. Write a 50 byte file, fsync, flush cache and
> wit for the world to finish. Pretty hard to teach people to use a nicer
> fdatasync(), when the majority of the cost now becomes flushing the
> cache of that 1TB drive you happen to have 8 partitions on. Good luck
> with that.

(responding to an email way back near the start of the thread)

I emailed Microsoft about their proposal to add a WRITE BARRIER command
to ATA, documented at
http://www.t13.org/Documents/UploadedDocuments/docs2007/e07174r0-Write_Barrier_Command_Proposal.doc

The MSFT engineer said they were definitely still pursuing this proposal.

IMO we could look at this too, or perhaps come up with an alternate
proposal like FLUSH CACHE RANGE(s).

Jeff