On 10 Mar 2013, at 19:03, folkert wrote:

> Are they mapped to "barriers"?

Yes

> And can I now safely buffer all writes until the barrier is/FUA is
> invoked and force them on the platters?

Yes, that's what any linux block driver is permitted to do. And your SATA drive 
may do just that.

> Unfortunately the client does not tell you if it will be using barriers
> so that you can use this buffering.

Any Linux block driver is permitted to do that buffering, so yes, the upper 
layer should expect it.

FWIW if you use barrier support, you *don't* want to be using O_SYNC or the 
sync option as everything will be treated as flushed.

What your server might do (I haven't read the code) that I think nbd-server 
doesn't currently do is cope properly with O_DIRECT which should speed things 
up by omitting a copy, if you are going to a real block device. That's 
non-trivial to fix in the current nbd due to the alignment requirements of 
O_DIRECT.

-- 
Alex Bligh





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