Windows: EOF for Synchronous Deferred Writes on XP/2003
The Windows IO Manager is not supposed to issue multiple
outstanding cached writes to a file system for a synchronous
file object. To do so would risk out of order application
of writes that extend the end of file and in turn risk data
corruption. It turns out that on Server 2003 SP2 and more
than likely XP and 2000 as well, if a file system returns
STATUS_PENDING because a write was deferred due to the
Windows Cache Manager failing CcCanIWrite(), the IO Manager
will happily continue issue subsequent write requests.
On OSes older than Vista disable the use of deferred writes
and sit in a spin loop waiting for the Windows cache manager
to make room. This is much less efficient and increases the
write latency but it is safe.