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Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2008 11:42:40 -0500
From: Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>
To: Pavel Machek <pavel@suse.cz>
Cc: Chris Friesen <cfriesen@nortel.com>, mikulas@artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz,
       clock@atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz,
       kernel list <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>, aviro@redhat.com
Subject: Re: writing file to disk: not as easy as it looks
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On Wed, Dec 03, 2008 at 09:46:40AM +0100, Pavel Machek wrote:
> Yes. fsync() seeems surprisingly high on Rusty's list of broken
> interfaces classification ('impossible to use correctly').

To be fair, fsync() was primarily intended for making sure that the
data had been written to disk, and not necessarily as a way of making
sure that write errors would be properly reflected back to the
application.  As you've pointed out, it's not really adequate for that
purpose.

						- Ted
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