On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 6:12 PM, nixlists <[email protected]> wrote: > qmail's author says "Queue reliability demands that single-byte writes > be atomic. This is true for a fixed-block filesystem such as UFS, and > for a logging > filesystem such as LFS."
I hope that doesn't mean what I interpret it to mean, because if you write one byte to the beginning of a file and one byte to the end of a file, there's no guarantee which byte hits the disk first. The other interpretation of it, meaning that you won't ever write half a byte, is true, but strikes me as exceptionally obvious and true of every filesystem. So what does it mean for a single byte write to be atomic?
