What is the problem with the write cache on journaled filesystems?
Many drives use a write back cache in order to speed up the performance of writes. However, there are conditions such as power failure when the write cache memory is never flushed to the actual disk. Further, the drive can de-stage data from the write cache to the platters in any order that it chooses. This causes problems for XFS and journaled filesystems in general because they rely on knowing when a write has completed to the disk. They need to know that the log information has made it to disk before allowing metadata to go to disk. When the metadata makes it to disk then the transaction can effectively be deleted from the log resulting in movement of the tail of the log and thus freeing up some log space. So if the writes never make it to the physical disk, then the ordering is violated and the log and metadata can be lost, resulting in filesystem corruption. With hard disk cache sizes of currently (Jan 2009) up to 32MB that can be a lot of valuable information. In a RAID with 8 su
