Re: PostgreSQL's handling of fsync() errors is unsafe and risks data loss at least on XFS

> On Apr 8, 2018, at 14:23, Greg Stark <stark@mit.edu> wrote:
>
> They consider dirty filesystem buffers when there's
> hardware failure preventing them from being written "a memory leak".

That's not an irrational position.  File system buffers are *not* dedicated memory for file system caching; they're
beingused for that because no one has a better use for them at that moment.  If an inability to flush them to disk
meantthat they suddenly became pinned memory, a large copy operation to a yanked USB drive could result in the system
havingno more allocatable memory.  I guess in theory that they could swap them, but swapping out a file system buffer
inhopes that sometime in the future it could be properly written doesn't seem very architecturally sound to me. 

--
-- Christophe Pettus
   xof@thebuild.com