Ramback does include an emergency mode which will endeavor to bring the disk up to date in a hurry should the UPS indicate that power has been lost. But that does not seem to be enough for everybody. In the resulting discussion, nobody complained about the sort of performance benefits that a tool like Ramback could provide. But there was a lot of concern about data integrity; it seems that many people distrust their battery, their hardware, and Linux. And that has led to a sort of impasse, with several developers claiming that Ramback would be too risky to use and Daniel dismissing their concerns as FUD.

FUD or not, those concerns are likely to be a difficult barrier for Ramback to overcome. Meanwhile, Daniel is looking for people to help test out the code, but that presents challenges of its own:

This driver is ready to try for a sufficiently brave developer. It will deadlock and livelock in various ways and you will have to reboot to remove it. But it can already be coaxed into running well enough for benchmarks, and when it solidifies it will be pretty darn amazing.

So far, reports from suitably courageous testers have been, well, scarce. I fear that this work could suffer the same fate as many of Daniel's other patches: they can contain brilliant ideas and great coding but just don't quite survive the encounter with the real, messy world. But we need people thinking about how our systems will work in the coming years; one hopes that Daniel won't stop.