core.fsyncmethod: add writeout-only mode

This commit introduces the `core.fsyncMethod` configuration
knob, which can currently be set to `fsync` or `writeout-only`.

The new writeout-only mode attempts to tell the operating system to
flush its in-memory page cache to the storage hardware without issuing a
CACHE_FLUSH command to the storage controller.

Writeout-only fsync is significantly faster than a vanilla fsync on
common hardware, since data is written to a disk-side cache rather than
all the way to a durable medium. Later changes in this patch series will
take advantage of this primitive to implement batching of hardware
flushes.

When git_fsync is called with FSYNC_WRITEOUT_ONLY, it may fail and the
caller is expected to do an ordinary fsync as needed.

On Apple platforms, the fsync system call does not issue a CACHE_FLUSH
directive to the storage controller. This change updates fsync to do
fcntl(F_FULLFSYNC) to make fsync actually durable. We maintain parity
with existing behavior on Apple platforms by setting the default value
of the new core.fsyncMethod option.

Signed-off-by: Neeraj Singh <neerajsi@microsoft.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/cache.h b/cache.h
index 04d4d2db25..82f0194a3d 100644
--- a/cache.h
+++ b/cache.h
@@ -995,6 +995,13 @@ extern char *git_replace_ref_base;
 
 extern int fsync_object_files;
 extern int use_fsync;
+
+enum fsync_method {
+	FSYNC_METHOD_FSYNC,
+	FSYNC_METHOD_WRITEOUT_ONLY
+};
+
+extern enum fsync_method fsync_method;
 extern int core_preload_index;
 extern int precomposed_unicode;
 extern int protect_hfs;