I worked on PostgreSQL's investigation and response to this stuff and I agree with you FWIW. But apparently only FreeBSD (any filesystem) and ZFS (any OS) agre

I worked on PostgreSQL's investigation and response to this stuff and I agree with you FWIW. But apparently only FreeBSD (any filesystem) and ZFS (any OS) agree with us. Other systems I looked at throw away buffers and/or mark them clean, and this goes all the way back to ancient AT&T code. Though no one has commented on any closed kernel's behaviour. I doubt anyone worried much when disks just died completely in the good old days. This topic is suddenly more interesting now as virtualisation and network storage create more kinds of transient failures, I guess.