> What the patch does is keep an array of the last four blocks which were
> modified since the last fsync(). If there have been no more than four
> blocks modified, then the ext2 filesystem can do a "fast fsync", which
> just flushes those four (or fewer) blocks to disk, without having to
> walk all of the indirect blocks looking for modified blocks. This
> should be extremely effective for programs like syslog which are doing
> frequent fsync()'s with minimal amounts of data written between calls to
> fsync().
This is a very important patch, because fsync() is needed in some
transaction oriented databases (they have to call fsync() or fdatasync()
on the log frequently to commit operations). For some of them 4 blocks
could be not enough though, perhaps a more generic version of your
patch that handles more than 4 blocks could be found - like keeping
the dirty blocks per inode on a special list.
-Andi
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