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Is ext4 Stable For Production Systems?
dr_dracula writes "Earlier this year, the ext4 filesystem was accepted into the Linux kernel. Shortly thereafter, it was discovered that some applications, such as KDE, were at risk of losing files when used on top of ext4. This was diagnosed as a rift between the design of the ext4 filesystem and the design of applications running on top of ext4. The crux of the problem was that applications were relying on ext3-specific behavior for flushing data to disk, which ext4 was not following. Recent kernel releases include patches to address these issues. My questions to the early adopters of ext4 are about whether the patches have performed as expected. What is your overall feeling about ext4? Do you think is solid enough for most users to trust it with their data? Did you find any significant performance improvements compared to ext3? Is there any incentive to move to ext4, other than sheer curiosity?"
Face it: your side lost. "fsync everywhere" is an infeasible, untenable, and useless position to take.
fsync-on-rename creates a much better environment for application developers and users alike. The Right Thing happens by default, and I maintain that nobody actually wants the unsafe rename behavior. Allowing an application "choice" in this respect is a red herring.
The only improvement I'd make it to flush the file involves on every rename, not just renames that happen to overwrite an existing file. Under the current scheme, an application doing the write-close-rename to replace a file will still be put in a bind if the file to write doesn't exist yet. (i.e., you can still end up with a zero-length file where no such file ever existed on a running system)