"scott.marlowe" <scott.marlowe@ihs.com> writes:
> Or a CPU frying, or a power supply dying, or a motherboard failure, or a
> kernel panic, or any number of other possibilities. Admittedly, the first
> line of defense is always good backups, but it's nice knowing that if one
> of my CPUs fry, I can pull it, put in the terminator / replacement, and my
> whole machine will likely come back up.
Well, note that in all of those cases the disk drive would still have a chance
to sync its buffers to disk. Linux isn't lying about fsync as far as its
buffers getting flushed, only the drive itself.
In theory even in those cases there's no guarantee of exactly how long the
drive will hold the buffers without committing them, but in practice I think
any sane drive will commit pretty damn soon or else normal power-off wouldn't
work.
--
greg