"Faeandar" wrote in message
...

....

As a side note, isn't it a tuneable paramter? Caching I mean. An OS
could be made to not cache read request data. Of course that would
severly impact it's actual funtion but that's not the question...

While many file systems allow applications to request unbuffered access to
disk, I know of none that allow you to specify that the file system should
itself cache no *metadata* about the disk or the files on it - and that's
where the worst confusion would occur.

(Not that using unbuffered access to metadata would wholly solve the problem
either: the data location or size could change between the time you read
the metadata and the time you acted based upon it. You really do need
inter-node synchronization of changes, even if only one node is performing
them and the other is only reading.)

- bill