Raw I/O library proposal, second (more pragmatic) draft

Seth Kurtzberg seth@cql.com
Tue, 5 Aug 2003 00:34:03 -0700


On Tuesday, August 5, 2003, at 12:30  AM, Ben Rudiak-Gould wrote:

> On Tue, 5 Aug 2003, Seth Kurtzberg wrote:
>
>> For my purposes (transaction logging for my database server) I need to
>> be able to guarantee that data is written to disk.  That is, it isn't
>> enough to disable buffering in the compiler libraries (all libraries,
>> more accurately), I need to also force the O/S to flush the data to
>> disk.
>>
>> This is difficult to do in a portable manner, obviously, but if a
>> practical way can be found it would have many uses in systems using
>> transactional semantics.  It would also get rid of an FFI dependency
>> for my code.
>
> My intended semantics for the osFlush function was always that it 
> would do
> its best to ensure that the data was "pushed as far as possible" toward
> its final destination.
>
> If you need a guarantee, the function could be made to return a Bool, 
> with
> True indicating that it was absolutely sure that the data had made it 
> all
> the way. But I don't think that it could ever return True. It might be
> running in a VMware sandbox without realizing it, for example. So 
> you'll
> probably have to run tests on your particular setup to see how well it
> works.

That is certainly true, but to get even that far the semantics have to 
exist.  You've answered my question; osFlush means (assuming that the 
O/S can provide the functionality) flush to permanent storage.

>
>
> -- Ben
>
>
>
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Seth Kurtzberg
CTO
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