START_SYNC will start a sync/commit, but not wait for it to
complete. Any modification started after the ioctl returns is
guaranteed not to be included in the commit. If a non-NULL
pointer is passed, the transaction id will be returned to
userspace.
WAIT_SYNC will wait for any in-progress commit to complete. If a
transaction id is specified, the ioctl will block and then
return (success) when the specified transaction has committed.
If it has already committed when we call the ioctl, it returns
immediately. If the specified transaction doesn't exist, it
returns EINVAL.
If no transaction id is specified, WAIT_SYNC will wait for the
currently committing transaction to finish it's commit to disk.
If there is no currently committing transaction, it returns
success.
These ioctls are useful for applications which want to impose an
ordering on when fs modifications reach disk, but do not want to
wait for the full (slow) commit process to do so.
Picky callers can take the transid returned by START_SYNC and
feed it to WAIT_SYNC, and be certain to wait only as long as
necessary for the transaction _they_ started to reach disk.
Sloppy callers can START_SYNC and WAIT_SYNC without a transid,
and provided they didn't wait too long between the calls, they
will get the same result. However, if a second commit starts
before they call WAIT_SYNC, they may end up waiting longer for
it to commit as well. Even so, a START_SYNC+WAIT_SYNC still
guarantees that any operation completed before the START_SYNC
reaches disk.
Signed-off-by: Sage Weil <sage@newdream.net>
Signed-off-by: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>
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