Hi, I do not know, if this patch is really necessary or not. I am not an expert in how the BARRIER flag should be interpreted. So this patch is more like a question, than a fix for any real bug.
Looking over the code I noticed, that nilfs_sync_file() gets called by the fsync() syscall and it basically constructs a new partial segment and calls blkdev_issue_flush(). nilfs_ioctl_sync(), which is used by the cleaner, also essentially works the same way. It writes all the dirty files to disk and calls blkdev_issue_flush(). nilfs_sync_fs() also writes out all the dirty files, but there is no blkdev_issue_flush() at the end. At first I thought, that nilfs_commit_super() may flush the block device anyway and therefore no additional flush is necessary, but nilfs_sb_dirty(nilfs) is only set to true if a new segment is started. So in the following scenario data could be lost despite a call to sync(): 1. Write out less data than a full segment 2. Call sync() 3. nilfs_sb_dirty() is false and nilfs_commit_super() is NOT called 4. Cut power to the device 5. Data loss As I stated above, I am not sure if this is really necessary. Maybe I have overlooked something obvious. br, Andreas Rohner Andreas Rohner (1): nilfs2: add missing blkdev_issue_flush() to nilfs_sync_fs() fs/nilfs2/super.c | 6 ++++++ 1 file changed, 6 insertions(+) -- 2.1.0 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-nilfs" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html