On Sat, 13 Jun 2020 12:12:05 -0400, Nick Holland wrote: > On 2020-06-11 12:07, Strahil Nikolov wrote: > > I always thought that 'sync' mount option is enough to avoid > > corruption of the FS. Am I just "fooling" myself ? > > As "sync" is the default...yes, I think you are.
Actually, by default only metadata is written synchronously. The "sync" mount option causes data to be written synchronously too. Of course, the disk *itself* has a cache so even with synchronous writes you can't be sure the data has actually made it to the platter. So yes, I agree that sync mounts are not really enough to help here. You are probably correct that softdep is better for this kind of thing since it does a better job of keeping the filesystem in a consistent state, at the cost of missing data when there is an unclean shutdown. In theory, the on-device cache can still cause issues when you lose power though. - todd
