From 7b9af2eb80b14bc38348efcdbf2f9c3a09c8c597 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Jeff Layton Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2020 19:37:31 -0400 Subject: [PATCH] sync.2: syncfs() now returns errors if writeback fails A patch has been merged for v5.8 that changes how syncfs() reports errors. Change the sync() manpage accordingly. Signed-off-by: Jeff Layton Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk --- man2/sync.2 | 24 +++++++++++++++++++++++- 1 file changed, 23 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/man2/sync.2 b/man2/sync.2 index 7198f3311..61e994c5a 100644 --- a/man2/sync.2 +++ b/man2/sync.2 @@ -86,11 +86,26 @@ to indicate the error. is always successful. .PP .BR syncfs () -can fail for at least the following reason: +can fail for at least the following reasons: .TP .B EBADF .I fd is not a valid file descriptor. +.TP +.B EIO +An error occurred during synchronization. +This error may relate to data written to any file on the filesystem, or on +metadata related to the filesytem itself. +.TP +.B ENOSPC +Disk space was exhausted while synchronizing. +.TP +.BR ENOSPC ", " EDQUOT +Data was written to a files on NFS or another filesystem which does not +allocate space at the time of a +.BR write (2) +system call, and some previous write failed due to insufficient +storage space. .SH VERSIONS .BR syncfs () first appeared in Linux 2.6.39; @@ -121,6 +136,13 @@ or .BR syncfs () provide the same guarantees as fsync called on every file in the system or filesystem respectively. +.PP +In mainline kernel versions prior to 5.8, +.\" commit 735e4ae5ba28c886d249ad04d3c8cc097dad6336 +.BR syncfs () +will only fail when passed a bad file descriptor (EBADF). In 5.8 +and later kernels, it will also report an error if one or more inodes failed +to be written back since the last syncfs call. .SH BUGS Before version 1.3.20 Linux did not wait for I/O to complete before returning.