Comment 102 for bug 317781

I think the best solution is to move EXT3's behavior in this regard to
EXT4, then ask developers to use the new style to ween them off of the
old style little by little. Asking all applications to change isn't
going to happen, and using the EXT3 save style is the only forseeable
way right now.

Tom Jaeger wrote:
> 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?
>