[RFC man-pages PATCH] sync.2: add details about new syncfs() behavior

[Jeff Layton]

syncfs() now also returns errors if writeback fails.

Signed-off-by: Jeff Layton <jlayton@xxxxxxxxxx>
---
 man2/sync.2 | 24 +++++++++++++++++++++++-
 1 file changed, 23 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

This patch shouldn't be merged until the relevant kernel patch series
has been merge. I'm hoping to get this into v5.8:

    [PATCH v6 0/2] vfs: have syncfs() return error when there are writeback errors

diff --git a/man2/sync.2 b/man2/sync.2
index 7198f3311b05..a025080713ed 100644
--- a/man2/sync.2
+++ b/man2/sync.2
@@ -86,11 +86,26 @@ to indicate the error.
 is always successful.
 .PP
 .BR syncfs ()
-can fail for at least the following reason:
+can fail for at least the following reasons:
 .TP
 .B EBADF
 .I fd
 is not a valid file descriptor.
+.TP
+.B EIO
+An error occurred during synchronization.
+This error may relate to data written to any file on the filesystem, or on
+metadata related to the filesytem itself.
+.TP
+.B ENOSPC
+Disk space was exhausted while synchronizing.
+.TP
+.BR ENOSPC ", " EDQUOT
+Data was written to a files on NFS or another filesystem which does not
+allocate space at the time of a
+.BR write (2)
+system call, and some previous write failed due to insufficient
+storage space.
 .SH VERSIONS
 .BR syncfs ()
 first appeared in Linux 2.6.39;
@@ -121,6 +136,13 @@ or
 .BR syncfs ()
 provide the same guarantees as fsync called on every file in
 the system or filesystem respectively.
+.PP
+In mainline kernel versions prior to 5.8,
+.\" commit <<< TBD >>>
+.BR syncfs ()
+will only fail with EBADF when passed a bad file descriptor. In 5.8
+and later kernels, it will also report an error if one or more inodes failed
+to be written back since the last syncfs call.
 .SH BUGS
 Before version 1.3.20 Linux did not wait for I/O to complete
 before returning.
-- 
2.25.3