Bryan Henderson wrote:
It's because of the words before that: "everything that was buffered when
sync()
started is hardened before the next sync() returns." The point is that
the second sync() is the one that waits (it actually waits for the
previous one to finish before it starts). By the way, I'm not talking
about Linux at this point. I'm talking about so-called POSIX systems in
general.
But it does sound like Linux has a pretty firm philosophy of synchronous
sync (I see it documented in an old man page), so I guess it's OK to rely
on it.
There are scenarios where you'd rather not have a process tied up while
syncing takes place. Stepping back, I would guess the primary original
purpose of sync() was to allow you to make a sync daemon. Early Unix
systems did not have in-kernel safety clean timers. A user space process
did that.
--
Bryan Henderson IBM Almaden Research Center
San Jose CA Filesystems
We have been playing around with various sync techniques that allow you
to get good data safety for a large batch of files (think of a restore
of a file system or a migration of lots of files from one server to
another). You can always restart a restore if the box goes down in the
middle, but once you are done, you want a hard promise that all files
are safely on the disk platter.
Using system level sync() has all of the disadvantages that you mention
along with the lack of a per-file system barrier flush.
You can try to hack in a flush by issuing an fsync() call on one file
per file system after the sync() completes, but whether or not the file
system issues a barrier operation is file system dependent.
Doing an fsync() per file is slow but safe. Writing the files without
syncing and then reopening and fsync()'ing each one in reasonable batch
size is much faster, but still kludgey.
An attractive, but as far as I can see missing feature, would be the
ability to do a file system specific sync() command. Another option
would be a batched AIO like fsync() with a bit vector of descriptors to
sync. Not surprising, but the best performance is reached when you let
the writing phase working asynchronously and let the underlying file
system do its thing and wrap it up with a group cache to disk sync and a
single disk write cache invalidate (barrier) at the end.
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