Comment Re:Has Ted Cooked the Benchmarks Again? (Score 2, Informative) 348
So before I tried agitating for programmers to fix their buggy applications, I had already implemented both the heuristic that XFS uses (if you truncate a file descriptor, add an implicit fsync on the close of that fd), and in addition I had implemented another heuristic (if you rename on top of an existing file, fsync the source file of the rename). This was to work around buggy applications, and as you can see, ext4 does even more than XFS does.
At the end of the day, though, the heuristic can sometimes get things wrong, and sometimes the heuristic will be too aggressive in forcing fsync()'s when it's not really necessary, which is why it's good to at least try to education application programs about something which even you agree shouldn't be a new thing.
(For example, if you don't fsync, and you want to run your application on another OS, like say, Solaris, you will be very sad.)
But it wasn't backside covering, although most people don't seem to realize it, FIRST I added the hueristics to work around the buggy code, and THEN I agitated for people to fix their d*mn code. But application programmers don't like being told that they are wrong, so this seems to be a case of "blame/shoot the messenger" --- with me having been cast into the role of the messenger.