XFS write cache flush policy

[Joe Landman]

On 12/08/2012 02:40 PM, Michael Monnerie wrote:
> Am Samstag, 8. Dezember 2012, 20:29:27 schrieb Matthias Schniedermeyer:
>> I have the same problem, several times.
>
> I'd like to chime in here, with a similar issue: I have Linux on my
> desktop, xfs is the home partition, 16G RAM. One day my system froze, no
> chance to do a buffer flush via SYS-S/U/B, I had to press the reset
> button (no power off, just reset). Upon restart, *lots* of files were
> gone, destroyed, etc, and my KDE desktop wouldn't work anymore. Luckily
> I have backups, and could restore - but this just shouldn't happen, and
> it was *much* better with older kernels. What is the problem that
> metadata isn't written to disk occasionally? I was on 3.6.6 when that
> happened, now on 3.6.8, so very recent.

I am not sure this is xfs specific ... I think I've had this problem on 
ext3 in the 3.x (x >= 5) region ... though I am trying to disambiguate 
this from an mdadm 3.2.6 bug.