Re: no universally correct setting for fsync

From: "Kevin Grittner" <Kevin(dot)Grittner(at)wicourts(dot)gov>
To: "Robert Haas" <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com>, "Bruce Momjian" <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us>
Cc: "Michael Tharp" <gxti(at)partiallystapled(dot)com>, <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>, "Craig Ringer" <craig(at)postnewspapers(dot)com(dot)au>
Subject: Re: no universally correct setting for fsync
Date: 2010-05-10 15:55:40
Message-ID: 4BE7E62C02000025000314B7@gw.wicourts.gov
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Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> "It might be safe" is a bit of a waffle. It would be nice if we
> could provide some more clear guidance as to whether it is or is
> not, or how someone could go about testing their hardware to find
> out.

I think that the issue is that you could have corruption if some,
but not all, disk sectors from a page were written from OS cache to
controller cache when a failure occurred. The window would be small
for a RAM-to-RAM write, but it wouldn't be entirely *safe* unless
there's some OS/driver environment where you could count on all the
sectors making it or none of them making it for every single page.
Does such an environment exist?

-Kevin

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