As it stands, it's not safe to use write back caching on IDE drives.
When the write completes as seen from the fs, it's not on the platter
yet. That's a problem. And as you mention, there's no guarentee that
writes won't be reordered as well.
So yes, either use the barrier patch or disable write caching.
-- Jens Axboe- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/