• [$] The ongoing quest for atomic buffered writes

    From LWN.net@86:200/23 to All on Tue Mar 3 06:40:08 2026
    There are many applications that need to be able to write multi-block
    chunks of data to disk with the assurance that the operation will either complete successfully or fail altogether - that the write will not be
    partially completed (or "torn"), in other words. For years, kernel
    developers have worked on providing atomic writes as a way of satisfying
    that need; see, for example, sessions from the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF (LSFMM+BPF) Summit from 2023, 2024,
    and 2025 (twice). While atomic direct I/O is now supported by some filesystems, atomic
    buffered I/O still is not. Filling
    that gap seems certain to be a 2026 LSFMM+BPF topic but, thanks to an early discussion, the shape of a solution might already be coming into focus.

    https://lwn.net/Articles/1060063/
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