What does HackerNews think of libeatmydata?
libeatmydata - because fsync() should be a no-op
> maybe disable flushes with https://github.com/stewartsmith/libeatmydata
overlayfs has a volatile mount option that has that effect. So stacking a volatile overlayfs with the upper and lower on the same ext4 could provide that behavior even for applications that can't be intercepted with LD_PRELOAD
Not recommended, but this is one of the things I tried (I tuned it to 1s to be slightly safer):
https://vadosware.io/post/everything-ive-seen-on-optimizing-...
But you probably want to be very sure that your desktop applications are somewhat safe with their data/can recover from crashes...
TIL of libeatmydata[0], if you're comfortable using that, you'd probably be comfortable disabling fsync on the datasets for those apps.
libeatmydata: https://github.com/stewartsmith/libeatmydata
It disables fsync, o_sync etc, making them no-ops, essentially making the programs writes unsafe. Very dangerous. But very useful when you're trying to bulk load data in to a MySQL database, say as preparation of a new slave (followed by manual sync commands, and very careful checksumming of tables before trusting what happened)