[OpenAFS-devel] The ihandle sync thing

[Chaskiel Grundman]

It seems that openafs 1.6.3 will remove the ihandle sync background
thread that was put in when foreground syncs were removed many years back.

part of the commit message says:

"Additionally, journalling filesystems common on fileserver backends
will typically ensure some consistency after a certain amount of time
(by default, 5 seconds on ZFS and ext3+), so doing this sync ourselves
is often redundant or even counterproductive."

Just because ext3 (in ordered mode) does something doesn't mean
it's correct or something you should count on. If you don't
fsync/fdatasync, there is no guarantee your data is on the media or ever
will be on the media.

I understand the current use of the ihandle cache for this is problematic,
but that is not an excuse to never sync.

I will be sad if I have to patch foreground syncs back into my
fileservers, but I will if I have to.

P.S. I am aware that ih_reallyclose() calls OS_SYNC(), but it's not very
useful.
ih_reallyclose() is not called under normal circumstances except when
deleting files or detaching volumes (on DAFS or shutdown)