Hi all,

I stumbled into an file synchronization problem, and I am curious if there are 
more people using  Yocto and ubifs/xfs/similar that have an interest of "fsync 
before rename"?

When trying to atomically update a file a common flow is "create copy, edit 
copy, rename copy->original", but this does for some file systems not guarantee 
that the file is not empty after a power fail. A more correct flow is "create 
copy, edit copy, fsync copy, rename copy->original", at least according to file 
system developers. This has been discussed a lot and the general status seems 
to be that many file system developers think that applications that does not 
fsync before rename are broken, and many application developers think that 
fsync is implied at rename and this needs to be fixed in the file systems. (I 
am (trying to) not picking a side, and just trying to solve my problems :) )

Since some file systems common in embedded systems (UBIFS, XFS) does not 
implement automatic fsync before rename, this becomes a bit of a problem if 
applications in Yocto does not sync "correctly". One of these applications is 
sed (in-place edit), and I am currently working on a patch to add fsync before 
rename (as a feature). Busybox are not interested in the feature (as they are 
of the opinion that this should be solved in the file system), but I am curious 
if there is any interest in these kind of features in Yocto?

Regards,
Sebastian
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