[nyanpasu64]

Would high-performance data storage be easier to implement on commodity hardware if operating systems supplied an API to get a blob of bytes, segmented out of an entire disk (eg. a file), that presented low-level semantics like a full-fledged SSD partition or drive?

I feel that operating systems need to provide self-contained reliable APIs designed for atomically overwriting configuration files, without losing permissions or overwriting symlinks or such. Or perhaps supply more powerful primitives, like a faster/weaker fsync that serves as an ordering barrier rather than flushing to disk, or an API to replace a file without altering permissions. One issue I've heard is:

> I even had an issue with atomic writes over ssh that created the temp file but where not able to rename it, so the old one stayed.