22.2. Enabling and Disabling Write Barriers

To mitigate the risk of data corruption during power loss, some storage devices use battery-backed write caches. Generally, high-end arrays and some hardware controllers use battery-backed write caches. However, because the cache's volatility is not visible to the kernel, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 enables write barriers by default on all supported journaling file systems.

For devices with non-volatile, battery-backed write caches and those with write-caching disabled, you can safely disable write barriers at mount time using the -o nobarrier option for mount. However, some devices do not support write barriers; such devices log an error message to /var/log/messages. For more information, see Table 22.1, “Write Barrier Error Messages per File System”.