Re: [Question] Does the kernel ignore errors writng to disk?

Bryan Henderson
2005-04-28T18:19:13Z

>See man fsync
>and also O_DIRECT if you need specific "to disk" support

Probably the most common way to get the simple but slow write function
where the write() call actually writes to stable storage, and fails if it
can't, is the O_SYNC open flag.

But even that, in some versions of Linux, can miss write errors. It's not
easy for Linux to catch them because the code that sees the I/O fail
doesn't know if it's part of some synchronous procedure where the user
will eventually find out about the error or the more common case where the
application has optimistically walked away and nothing can be done but
write off the loss.

--
Bryan Henderson IBM Almaden Research Center
San Jose CA Filesystems