Comment 101 for bug 317781

Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> @Raine,
>
> Well, if the applications were written correctly, there wouldn't be any
> data loss problems. I suppose we could thank the unreliable proprietary
> binary drivers that were causing all of these crashes, so we could find
> out about the buggy application code. :-)

Well, maybe if the kernel actually exposed the API that applications
need (namely, in this case, atomically replacing the contents of a file
without forcing it [or in case of ext3 the whole file system] to be
written to disk), then application would have an easier time "doing
things right".

Anyone want to venture a guess as to how many laptop hard drives have
died due to excessive wear caused by firefox calling fsync multiple
times on basically any user action to ensure data integrity?