Found on a certain other DBMS' mailing list:
* InnoDB: When MySQL/InnoDB is compiled on Mac OS X 10.2 or earlier,
detect the operating system version at run time and use the
`fcntl()' file flush method on Mac OS X versions 10.3 and later.
Apple had disabled `fsync()' in Mac OS X for internal disk drives,
which caused corruption at power outages.
If that claim is true then we are vulnerable to data corruption on power
failure on OS X. Comments, test cases?
regards, tom lane