The behavior of fsync is a battle of OS developers and OEMs versus application and database developers. Gaming the implementation of fsync to do less than fully fsync makes benchmarks look amazing, improves user perceived latency, and reduces flash wear. On the other hand, it corrupts data - but that's rare, "the hardware is failing anyway", etc.
That's how you end up with stuff like OS X's "no really, fsync" param [1], or Motorola shipping nobarrier on their phones. [2]
What you call "broken" others call "performance choices". Except SSD controllers, they are big fat phonies.
Look at how much slower CPUs are without those speculative execution tricks. I can buy gigabytes of RAM with a 20 I found in an old jacket. You can explore entire worlds consisting of gigabytes of high res textures and mesh data in near real-time, while downloading 4 new albums off the internet.
Yes, it is breaking the promise of what it is supposed to do. If fsync() was defined as "will ensure your data is on disk, unless that's kinda slow, then who knows", then the behaviour would not be broken, just potentially useless for many applications. But if you promise to ensure something is stored on disk, and then don't, that's the definition of being broken.
This. It's like those counterfeit memory cards you could get on eBay, that had a 128 Mb chip but reported themselves as 8 Gigs or so. "Works perfectly if you stay below 128 Mb!"
That's how you end up with stuff like OS X's "no really, fsync" param [1], or Motorola shipping nobarrier on their phones. [2]
[1] https://github.com/google/leveldb/issues/203#issuecomment-55...
[2] http://taras.glek.net/post/Followup-on-Pixel-vs-Moto:fsync/