Re: Linux 2.6.29

Jeff Garzik
2009-03-27T19:43:53Z

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> So the fact is, "people should always use fsync" simply isn't a realistic
> expectation, nor is it historically accurate. Claiming it is is just
> obviously bogus. And claiming that people _should_ do it is crazy, since
> it performs badly enough to simply not be realistic.
>
> Alternatives should be looked at. For desktop apps, the best alternatives
> are likely simply stronger default consistency guarantees. Exactly the
> "we don't guarantee that your data hits the disk, but we do guarantee that
> if you renamed on top of another file, you'll not have lost _both_
> contents".

On the other side of the coin, major desktop apps Firefox and
Thunderbird already use it: Firefox uses sqlite to log open web pages
in case of a crash, and sqlite in turn sync's its journal as any good
database app should. [I think tytso just got them to use fdatasync and
a couple other improvements, to make this not-quite-so-bad]

Thunderbird hits the disk for each email received -- always wonderful
with those 1000-email git-commit-head downloads... :)

So, arguments about "people should..." aside, existing desktops apps
_do_ fsync and we get to deal with the bad performance :/

Jeff