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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: fsync() madness
From:       "David Jarvie" <djarvie () kde ! org>
Date:       2008-04-22 11:07:51
Message-ID: 54277.134.146.0.41.1208862471.squirrel () www ! sensical ! net
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On Monday 21 April 2008 20:38, Esben Mose Hansen wrote:
> I discussed this with a friend (who liked XFS because it could online grow
> >:)
> ) and it seems that the worst part of XFS behaviour in this regard was
> fixed
> in 2.6.22 --- the bit where any dirty file was zeroed just to be sure(!).
> So
> maybe we don't have to sync() quite so much now.  He has tested it a lot
> of
> times by installing a bios that crashed linux all the time, and it seems
> to work much better now :)

The fact that the XFS problems were a bug which has now been fixed is
surely a good illustration of why KDE should not concern itself with OS or
file system details. It should leave decisions about whether to sync to
disc to the OS. If there's a problem at that level, it's a system-wide
problem which needs to be fixed outside KDE.

If KDE tries to preempt OS implementation details like this, it will not
only (as in this case) reduce performance for everybody, but it will also
prevent OS/filesystem improvements, when they occur, from feeding through
to give benefits to the KDE user.

-- 
David Jarvie.
KAlarm author & maintainer.
http://www.astrojar.org.uk/kalarm

 
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