From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:57742) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1XMAn6-0005OL-BP for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Tue, 26 Aug 2014 03:03:46 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1XMAn0-0002Ay-MT for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Tue, 26 Aug 2014 03:03:40 -0400 Received: from mail-qc0-x22b.google.com ([2607:f8b0:400d:c01::22b]:53228) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1XMAn0-0002Au-IO for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Tue, 26 Aug 2014 03:03:34 -0400 Received: by mail-qc0-f171.google.com with SMTP id r5so15130883qcx.30 for ; Tue, 26 Aug 2014 00:03:34 -0700 (PDT) Sender: Paolo Bonzini Message-ID: <53FC3136.50900@redhat.com> Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2014 09:03:18 +0200 From: Paolo Bonzini MIME-Version: 1.0 References: <1009168463.49610.1408133034828.JavaMail.zimbra@xes-inc.com> <985931631.51123.1408133895894.JavaMail.zimbra@xes-inc.com> <20140819145925.GB13680@stefanha-thinkpad.redhat.com> <838926932.102908.1408490438455.JavaMail.zimbra@xes-inc.com> <280510069.69184.1408990389981.JavaMail.zimbra@xes-inc.com> In-Reply-To: <280510069.69184.1408990389981.JavaMail.zimbra@xes-inc.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] Using cache=writeback safely on qemu 1.4.0 and later List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: Andrew Martin , Stefan Hajnoczi Cc: qemu-devel Il 25/08/2014 20:13, Andrew Martin ha scritto: > Even if the python daemon or apache2 did not fsync the modified files, isn't > there some action that the OS takes periodically to flush dirty pages to disk? > This seems to be implied in the SuSE documentation: > https://www.suse.com/documentation/sles11/book_kvm/data/sect1_1_chapter_book_kvm.html > "the normal page cache management will handle commitment to the storage device." ... using fsync :) > In the case of the files uploaded by apache2, they were added to the server days > before the power outage, so it seems like there would have been ample time for > those changes to have been flushed. Remember that cache=writeback has a huge cache, whose size is several gigabytes. At some point there was a QEMU bug that caused the guest not to do fsyncs. It was fixed by commit ef5bc96268. Paolo