Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] ide.c make write cacheing controllable by guest

[Ian Jackson]

Jamie Lokier writes ("Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] ide.c make write cacheing 
controllable by guest"):
> However, I notice that it tells the guest that data is committed to
> hard storage when the host has merely called fsync().

Yes, that's what fsync is supposed to do.

> On Linux (and other host OSes), fdatsync() and fsync() don't always
> commit data to hard storage; it sometimes only commits it to the hard
> drive cache.  (Seriously, just look at fs/ext3/fsync.c; only journal
> writes cause the flush, and they aren't done if the inode itself
> hasn't changed).

As Chris Wedgwood says, I think this is a bug.  I was going to quote
SuSv3 but sadly it's very vague.

> Ideally, the host would provide variation of fdatasync() which flushes
> data to hard storage in the same way that kernel filesystem journal
> writes can do, and Qemu would use that.

Another question arises: do we want bdrv_flush to call (eventually)
fsync or fdatasync ?  If the latter we need to make sure that we call
fsync instead when necessary, for example when a cow file is extended.

Ian.