[$] Trading off safety and performance in the kernel

The kernel community ordinarily tries to avoid letting users get into aposition where the integrity of their data might be compromised. There areexceptions, though; consider, for example, the ability to explicitly flushimportant data to disk (or more importantly, to avoid flushing at any giventime). Buffering I/O in this manner can significantly improve disk writeI/O throughput, but if application developers are careless, the result canbe data loss should the system go down at an inopportune time. Recentlythere have been a couple of proposed performance-oriented changes that havetested the community's willingness to let users put themselves into danger.<p>Click below (subscribers only) for the full story from this week's KernelPage.