Re: ext4 finally doing the right thing

On Fri, 2010-01-15 at 22:05 -0500, Greg Smith wrote:
> A few months ago the worst of the bugs in the ext4 fsync code started
> clearing up, with
> http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=5f3481e9a80c240f169b36ea886e2325b9aeb745
> as a particularly painful one.

Wow, thanks for the heads-up!

> On one side, we might finally be
> able to use regular drives with their caches turned on safely, taking
> advantage of the cache for other writes while doing the right thing with
> the database writes.

That could be good news. What's your opinion on the practical
performance impact? If it doesn't need to be fsync'd, the kernel
probably shouldn't have written it to the disk yet anyway, right (I'm
assuming here that the OS buffer cache is much larger than the disk
write cache)?

Regards,
Jeff Davis