Mark didn't mention this in his article, but writes to the inode are only serialized in jfs/ext(2|3|4) if you are using direct I/O (i.e O_DIRECT) which for perf

Mark didn't mention this in his article, but writes to the inode are only serialized in jfs/ext(2|3|4) if you are using direct I/O (i.e O_DIRECT) which for performance reasons MySQL ibdata files often are. This is why this problem does not often show up on filesystem benchmarks.