Sigh, no. A barrier is not a full flush. A barrier does not guarantee data persistence, it guarantees write ordering. A barrier will not make sure the data hits disk and is not lost on power failure. It just makes sure that subsequent data won't show up and not the prior data, on power failure. NVMe doesn't even have a concept of barriers in this sense. An OS-level barrier can be faster than a full sync only because it doesn't need to wait for the FLUSH to actually complete, it can just maintain a concept of ordering within the OS and make sure it is maintained with interleaved FLUSH calls.

I don't know why you keep pressing on this issue. macOS has the same performance with F_FULLFSYNC as Linux does with fsync(). Why would they be different things? We're getting the same numbers. This entire thing started because fsync() on these Macs on Linux was dog slow and we couldn't figure out why macOS was fast. Then we found F_FULLFSYNC which has the same semantics as fsync() on Linux. And now both OSes perform equally slowly on this hardware. They're obviously doing the same thing. And the same thing on Linux on non-Apple SSDs is faster. I'm sure I could install macOS on this x86 iMac again and show you how F_FULLFSYNC on macOS also gives better performance on this WD drive than on the M1, but honestly, I don't have the time for that, the isssue has been thoroughly proved already.

Actually, I have a better one that won't waste as much of my time.

Plugs in a shitty USB3 flash drive into the M1.

224 IOPS with F_FULLFSYNC. On a shitty flash drive. 58 IOPS with F_FULLFSYNC. On internal NVMe.

Both FAT32.

Are you convinced there's a problem yet?

(I'm pretty sure the USB flash drive has no write cache, so of course it is equally fast/slow with just fsync(), but my point still stands - committing writes to persistent storage is slower on this NVMe controller than on a random USB drive)