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0e1f616
(Get the code!)
@3vi1,
At least for files which are constantly being replaced, the patches which are queued to be merged into mainline at the next merge window should cause ext4 to work no worse than ext3, and that seems to be most people were complaining about on this bug. Most editors, like vi and emacs, are actually pretty good about calling fsync() when you save a file. I just checked OpenOffice, and it uses fsync() when it is done saving a file as well. So that tends to take care of most of the other common cases. (Things like object files in a build directly generally aren't considered precious since you can always do a "make clean; make" to generate them.
Personally, I test bleeding edge kernels all the time, and I've never had a problem simply because I usually know before I'm about to do something that might be dangerous, and so I just use the "sync" command in a terminal beforehand.
The other thing that probably helps is that I also avoid hardware that requires proprietary video drivers like the plague. Why settle for machines that crash all the time? There are enough hardware options out there that don't require proprietary video drivers, I don't understand why folks would even consider buying cards that need binary-only video drivers. There's a reason why kernel developers refuse to debug kernels that have been tainted by binary drivers; at least a few years ago, Nvidia drivers had enough wild pointer errors that would randomly corrupt kernel memory and cause hard-to-debug kernel oops and panics in completely unrelated subsystems that they were pretty much single-handedly responsible for the kernel "taint" flag infrastructure; kernel developers were wasting too much time trying to debug buggy binary-only video-drivers.
Finally, if you are really paranoid, you can mount your filesystem with the "sync" option; this works for all filesystems, and will force writes out to disk as soon as they are issued --- you can also toggle this on and off by remounting the filesystem. i.e., "mount -o remount,sync /mntpt" and "mount -o remount,async /mntpt". This will work for any filesystem, as "sync" and "async" are generic mount option flags.