Re: Linux 2.6.29

Mark Lord
2009-03-30T14:44:51Z

Ric Wheeler wrote:
> Mark Lord wrote:
>> Ric Wheeler wrote:
..
>> The kernel can crash, and the drives, in practice, will still
>> flush their caches to media by themselves. Within a second or two.
>
> Even with desktops, I am not positive that the drive write cache
> survives a kernel crash without data loss. If I remember correctly,
> Chris's tests used crashes (not power outages) to display the data
> corruption that happened without barriers being enabled properly.
..

Linux f/s barriers != drive write caches.

Drive write caches are an almost total non-issue for desktop users,
except on the (very rare) event of a total, sudden power failure
during extended write outs.

Very rare. Yes, a huge problem for server farms. No question.
But the majority of Linux systems are probably (still) desktops/notebooks.

Cheers