convosync mount option

The convosync (convert osync) mode has the following suboptions:

The convosync=delay mode causes synchronous and data synchronous writes to be delayed rather than to take effect immediately. No special action is performed when closing a file. This option effectively cancels any data integrity guarantees normally provided by opening a file with O_SYNC.

See the open(2), fcntl(2), and vxfsio(7) manual pages.

Warning:

Be very careful when using the convosync=closesync or convosync=delay mode because they actually change synchronous I/O into non-synchronous I/O. Applications that use synchronous I/O for data reliability may fail if the system crashes and synchronously written data is lost.

The convosync=dsync mode converts synchronous writes to data synchronous writes.

As with closesync, the direct, unbuffered, and dsync modes flush changes to the file to disk when it is closed. These modes can be used to speed up applications that use synchronous I/O. Many applications that are concerned with data integrity specify the O_SYNC fcntl in order to write the file data synchronously. However, this has the undesirable side effect of updating inode times and therefore slowing down performance. The convosync=dsync, convosync=unbuffered, and convosync=direct modes alleviate this problem by allowing applications to take advantage of synchronous writes without modifying inode times as well.

Before using convosync=dsync, convosync=unbuffered, or convosync=direct, make sure that all applications that use the file system do not require synchronous inode time updates for O_SYNC writes.