Review Request: kio-file: sync file copy to /media/

[Luciano Montanaro]

On venerdì 22 gennaio 2010, Davide Bettio wrote:
> -----------------------------------------------------------
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> http://reviewboard.kde.org/r/2690/
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> 
> Review request for kdelibs and David Faure.
> 
> 
> Summary
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> 
> This simple patch allows file copy to external devices to be synchronous.
>  This patch assumes that external devices are mounted on a subdirectory of
>  /media/. If /media/ is not used this patch will not work so everything
>  will be as before. For more dettails see also
>  https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=195044.
> 

Do we really want that? I find synchronous output brings more problems than 
it solves. 

SuSE Linux did mount removable devices with the sync option, but the few 
times I had to use it on floppy disks, the IO was extremely slow and noisy.
That means, for each block that landed on the disk, an update was made to 
the directory entry so the writing head did ping-pong between the file block 
and the directory block.

The same thing (but silent) would happen with flash media; This is probably 
fast enough that speed will not be a problem, but wync write will wear the  
blocks much faster than with an asyncronous mount. So I would rather not 
have this behaviour enabled for my devices. Maybe the sync interval could be 
kept shorter?     

> 
> Diffs
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> 
>   /trunk/KDE/kdelibs/kioslave/file/file_unix.cpp 1077183
> 
> Diff: http://reviewboard.kde.org/r/2690/diff
> 
> 
> Testing
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> 
> This patch is recent, so I'm testing it right now. kio-file is a critical
>  component so I will do more tests.
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Davide
> 


-- 
Luciano Montanaro //
                \X/ mikelima at cirulla.net