Re: We really ought to do something about O_DIRECT and data=journalled on ext4

Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> writes:
> It's a bug and it's our bug.

No, it's a filesystem bug that this particular filesystem doesn't
support a perfectly reasonable combination of options, and doesn't
even fail gracefully as it could easily do. But assigning blame
doesn't help much.

> Back when we added O_DIRECT, we assumed
> that support for O_DIRECT/opensync could be determined on an OS/kernel
> basis, because that was the information we had. Now it turns out that
> support can vary *by filesystem* and *between remounts*. We didn't have
> any way of knowing different back in 2004, but that doesn't mean we
> don't need to fix our mistaken assumption now.

> Ideally, we would change our code to test support for O_DIRECT on
> startup, rather than at compile time, and backport *that*.

I'm not convinced that a startup-time test would be enough either,
since as you note a remount might be enough to change the situation.

I think the best answer is to get out of the business of using
O_DIRECT by default, especially seeing that available evidence
suggests it might not be a performance win anyway.

regards, tom lane