Description of problem: In contrast to the now-obsolete smbfs, cifs ignores fsync to guarantee that all volatile data is written to stable storage on the server side, provided the server honors the request (which, to my knowledge, is true for Windows and Samba with 'strict sync' enabled). A patch was submitted this week: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/797589 It would be nice to have fsync in cifs as soon as possible in RHEL.
I've already got the patches for this in my test kernels: http://people.redhat.com/jlayton ...if you have a place to do so, please test them and verify that they fix this problem for you.
This request was evaluated by Red Hat Product Management for inclusion in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux maintenance release. Product Management has requested further review of this request by Red Hat Engineering, for potential inclusion in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Update release for currently deployed products. This request is not yet committed for inclusion in an Update release.
I tested kernel-xen-2.6.18-133.el5.jtltest.66.x86_64.rpm from http://people.redhat.com/jlayton in our test environment. Looks very good - fsync seems to be sent by cifs client. What are the next steps for this patch?
I propose it internally (most likely as part of the larger CIFS update on which I'm working). Unless something goes wrong, this patch will most likely be in the RHEL 5.4 kernel.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 465143 ***