On Jun 16,  6:40pm, Ethan Solomita wrote:
} Subject: Re: SOFTDEPS safe for qmail?
} Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
} > 
} > This is all really much ado over nothing.
} > 
} 	I agree. The warning that started this whole discussion warned against
} using *any* async filesystem, where soft updates was given as an
} example. If someone is really motivated, I guess you could use
} ktrace/kdump to see if it opens all its files O_SYNC. Or you could put
} it on its own partition and mount it sync.

Even that doesn't help if your disk does write caching.  I'm pretty sure
that all IDE disks do write caching, otherwise their performance would
suck.  Pretty much every SCSI disk seems to ship with write caching
enabled these days as well, but at least you can turn it off and if
you have tagged command queueing the performance penalty isn't nearly
as painful.