In principle, yes. I believe most modern filesystems use (kernel-level) write barriers to ensure filesystem consistency, and those do depend on having hardware

In principle, yes. I believe most modern filesystems use (kernel-level) write barriers to ensure filesystem consistency, and those do depend on having hardware barriers as well. The kernel is not set up to export this interface, however, and there doesn't appear to be any serious work being done to fix that. EDIT: http://pl.atyp.us/2013-11-fixing-fsync.html http://pl.atyp.us/2013-11-fixing-fsync.html has more details.