PATCH: Forcible delaying of UFS (soft)updates

[M. Warner Losh]

In message: <200304121548.56524.cbehanna at panasas.com>
            Chris BeHanna <cbehanna at panasas.com> writes:
: > Unless, of course, your system or power happens to fail.
: > Imagine you have a database program keeping track of banking
: > transactions. [...]
: 
:     Then you won't be running that program on a *laptop*, now, will
: you?  It'll be in a NOC with hefty power-failover hardware already in
: place.
: 
:     Can we pretty please keep criticisms of this patch in their proper
: context?  Power-saving features for a *laptop* have little or no
: bearing on the behavior of mission-critical back office applications.

Actually, you will.  Let's not think laptops are such crappy things
that nothing interesting is going on on them.

I get all my email on my laptop.  nmh uses fsync (or did once upon a
time) to make sure that its messages are properly on fixed media
format.  There are other programs that I use all the time that do this
too (emacs springs to mind).  When I save a file, I damn well want it
on disk, in case the crappy batteries that I have cause me to go down
before the timeout period is over.

So not only is this not a theoretical objection, the laptop that I'm
using right now is a prime example.

Warner