Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 1 Apr 2009 06:20:50 +0100 | From | Sitsofe Wheeler <> | Subject | Re: Ext4 and the "30 second window of death" |
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On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 09:50:10PM -0400, Theodore Tso wrote: > > But still, you're right. In some cases, you really want "fsync()" to > mean "fsync()". I'm not sure how often such applications _should_ be
Hmm. This is starting to sound a lot like the OSX fsync ( http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/Manpages/man2/fsync.2.html ) where there is effectively a "fsync harder" syscall (F_FULLFSYNC fcntl11).
> If all they are doing is browsing the web, and the issue is firefox's > desire to constantly write to their home directory, the user should be > able to say, "you know, my battery life is more important that making > sure that every last web page I visit is saved away in some file --- > Firefox's 'Awesome Bar' really isn't worth that much to me."
The "Awesome(bar) Firefox 3 fsync Problem" isn't that you are missing a day's worth of browsing. The issue is that the sqlite database might become corrupt and lose _all history_ if fsync lies/doesn't happen and a crash occurs ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435712#c10). With Firefox 2 there was a file swap happening so an fsync wasn't vital.
Just out of curiosity, when laptop mode is happening is there a guarantee that writes to other files won't be reordered to before the fsync?
-- Sitsofe | http://sucs.org/~sits/
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