Can Applications Recover from fsync Failures?
Explore the intricacies of fsync failures and their impact on file systems and data-intensive applications in this USENIX ATC '20 conference talk. Delve into a comprehensive analysis of how ext4, XFS, and Btrfs file systems react to fsync failures, uncovering commonalities and differences in their behavior. Examine the failure-handling strategies employed by popular applications like PostgreSQL, LMDB, LevelDB, SQLite, and Redis, and discover why these approaches fall short in preventing catastrophic outcomes such as data loss and corruption. Learn about the implications of these findings for designing file systems and applications that aim to provide robust durability guarantees. Gain insights into the challenges of achieving true data durability and the potential directions for improvement in this critical area of computer science.