Mark Lord wrote:
quoted text
> Ric Wheeler wrote:
>> Mark Lord wrote:
>>> Ric Wheeler wrote:
> ..
>>> The kernel can crash, and the drives, in practice, will still
>>> flush their caches to media by themselves.  Within a second or two.
>>
>> Even with desktops, I am not positive that the drive write cache 
>> survives a kernel crash without data loss. If I remember correctly, 
>> Chris's tests used crashes (not power outages) to display the data 
>> corruption that happened without barriers being enabled properly.
> ..
> 
> Linux f/s barriers != drive write caches.
> 
> Drive write caches are an almost total non-issue for desktop users,
> except on the (very rare) event of a total, sudden power failure
> during extended write outs.
> 
> Very rare.

Heck, even I have lost power on a plane, while a laptop in laptop mode 
was flushing out work.  Not that rare.


quoted text
> Yes, a huge problem for server farms.  No question.
> But the majority of Linux systems are probably (still) desktops/notebooks.

But it doesn't really matter who is what majority, does it?  At the 
present time at least, we have not designated any filesystems "desktop 
only", nor have we declared Linux a desktop-only OS.

Any generalized decision that hurts servers to help desktops would be 
short-sighted.  Robbing Peter, to pay Paul, is no formula for OS success.

	Jeff



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