Re: fsync in glib/gio

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Fri, 2009-03-13 at 14:35 +0100, Sven Neumann wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Fri, 2009-03-13 at 14:11 +0100, Mathias Hasselmann wrote:
> 
> > I think you don't understand the problem.
> 
> That might very well be the case. I had a look at the presentation that
> Alex linked to in the initial post in this thread. But I would have
> preferred a document that doesn't look at the issue from a database
> developer point of view.

Here is a comment from the "save file" point of view.
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/317781/comments/54

> It seems wrong to work around broken file-systems on the application
> level. That only takes away pressure from the file-system developers to
> address the problem properly.

I don't disagree, but on the other hand. Users are losing data as we
speak. (See above ubuntu bug report)

One compromise we could make it to only fsync in the case we're actually
overwriting an existing file. This would mean that we don't risk loosing
both the old and the new version of the file, you only lose "new" files.
This case is far less common so the performance aspects are not as bad,
and its also get rids of the worst failure mode.