ext4 vs fsync, my take

Posted by Scott_Ruecker on Mar 17, 2009 2:50 AM EDT
blogs.gnome.org; By Alexander Larsson
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There has been a lot of discussion about the ext4 data loss issue, and I see a lot of misconceptions, both about why rename() is used and what guarantees POSIX gives. I’ll try to give the background, and then my opinion on the situation. There are two basic ways to update a file. You can either truncate the old file and write the new contents, or you can write the new contents to a temporary file and rename it over the old file when finished. The rename method have several advantages, partly based on the fact that rename is atomic.

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