Comment 225 for bug 317781

As far as I understand, the problem has been fixed for overwriting by rename and overwriting by truncate. Is it an issue at all for just overwriting part of a file, without truncating it first?

I realize that there are basically no guarantees when fsync() is not used, but will such writes to already allocated blocks be written on every commit interval (by default 5 seconds)?

Or can the changes possibly remain in the cache much longer, since there is no chance of metadata corruption? (It would seem that the inode wouldn't have to change except for modification time, and unlike for newly allocated blocks, there is also no security issue, since the owner of the file can only get access to his own stale data after a crash, not somebody else's, as it would be with newly allocated blocks.)