[Beowulf] Sidebar: Vista Rant

[andrew holway]

http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2007/01/20/windows-vista-content-protection-twenty-questions-and-answers.aspx

the other foot

On 19/07/07, Tim Cutts <tjrc at sanger.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> On 19 Jul 2007, at 1:36 am, Chris Samuel wrote:
>
> > InnoDB: When MySQL/InnoDB is compiled on Mac OS X 10.2 or earlier,
> > detect the
> > operating system version at run time and use the fcntl() file flush
> > method on
> > Mac OS X versions 10.3 and later. In Mac OS X, fsync() does not
> > flush the
> > write cache in the disk drive, but the special fcntl() does;
> > however, the
> > flush request is ignored by some external devices. Failure to flush
> > the
> > buffers may cause severe database corruption at power outages.
>
> And this is different from Linux how?
>
> Man sync(2) on Linux says:
>
> BUGS
>         According  to the standard specification (e.g., SVID), sync()
> schedules
>         the writes, but may return before the actual writing is
> done.  However,
>         since  version  1.3.20  Linux does actually wait.  (This
> still does not
>         guarantee data integrity: modern disks have large caches.)
>
> Man fsync on Mac OS X 10.4 says:
>
>       Note that while fsync() will flush all data from the host to
> the drive
>       (i.e. the "permanent storage device"), the drive itself may not
> physi-
>       cally write the data to the platters for quite some time and it
> may be
>       written in an out-of-order sequence.
>
> Those look like much the same caveats to me.  At least later versions
> of Mac OS X supply the fcntl() methods to specifically ask the driver
> to commit (although how it can possibly guarantee that I don't know -
> the device could be a long way away across a SAN); that possibility
> does not exist on Linux, as far as I know, although I'm willing to be
> corrected.
>
> Any code that relies on sync(), or any other method which just
> results in a *request* to flush the data to the physical storage, is
> going to have small windows where the data is at risk.  Enter UPS,
> stage right.  :-)
>
> Mind you, MySQL is perfectly capable of corrupting its own data
> without relying on rare hardware and power failures to blame for it.
>
> Tim
>
>
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