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Ext4 Data Losses Explained, Worked Around
ddfall writes "H-Online has a follow-up on the Ext4 file system — Last week's news about data loss with the Linux Ext4 file system is explained and new solutions have been provided by Ted Ts'o to allow Ext4 to behave more like Ext3."
The first question that came to mind when I read that is "why would the average application need to concern itself with filesystem details?"
They don't. Applications just need to concern themselves with the details of of the APIs they use, and the guarantees those APIs do or don't provide.
The POSIX file APIs specify quite clearly that there is no guarantee that your data is on the disk until you call fsync(). The problem is with applications that assumed they could ignore what the specification said just because it always seemed to work okay on the file systems they tested with.
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