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, 3 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/compat/mingw.h b/compat/mingw.h
index c9a52ad64a..6074a3d3ce 100644
--- a/compat/mingw.h
+++ b/compat/mingw.h
@@ -329,6 +329,9 @@ int mingw_getpagesize(void);
 #define getpagesize mingw_getpagesize
 #endif
 
+int win32_fsync_no_flush(int fd);
+#define fsync_no_flush win32_fsync_no_flush
+
 struct rlimit {
 	unsigned int rlim_cur;
 };