Re:Disk write buffering and its interactions with write flushes
by vlovich123 on Friday March 22, 2024 @03:25AM
(#39788157)
As I mention elsewhere in the thread, reading the kernel documentation for the various flags suggests that the kernel devs are also concerned about multiple writes to the same piece of data & thus buffering lets you potential elide unnecessary disk I/O.
This is probably much less of a concern today, as NVMe drives - beside having many orders of magnitude higher IOPS capacity - also have (at least on paper) much better hardware support for high I/O concurrency. It may still make sense, even today, if your hardware (or stack) limits IOPS.