Re: [PULL REQUEST] ext3, jbd, ext2, and quota fixes for 3.1-rc1

Linus Torvalds
2011-07-26T19:15:29Z

On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 11:59 AM, Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> wrote:
>
> In addition to beeing bogus the code also is useless.  fsync on a file
> explicitly does not guarantee anything at all about the parent, and
> never really has on Linux either.

Well, it may never have done that, but it might still be a case of
quality-of-implementation.

The data blocks and inode indirect blocks being stable on disk doesn't
help hugely if you cannnot actually reach the inode itself.

But yeah, I suspect it's not worth the bother. For many common
situations, it's the rename that moves it to the final place that is
the critical one as far as parent directory is concerned, not the
fsync of the file itself.

Linus