this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
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Privacy
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Perhaps not. But the flag allows for direct I/O for data, bypassing buffers which can be overrun with certain size blocks, potentially causing dirty buffer depending on the machine being used. My understanding is that it's "more reliable" for writing (especially on shitty USB Flash drives) and getting the exact ISO properly written.
But it could be useless all the same - I'm just pointing out that OPs command is not the one recommended by Fedora when writing their ISO. Also OP is less likely to pull the drive before buffers have flushed this way.
Oh yeah that's where I was getting at, but I didn't have time to write that out earlier. I agree that OP probably pulled out the usb stick before buffers were flushed. I imagine that direct I/O would mitigate this problem a lot because presumably whatever buffers still exist (there would some hardware buffers and I think Linux kernel I/O buffers) will be minimal compared to the potentially large amount of dirty pages one might accumulate using normal cached writes. So I imagine those buffers would be empty very shortly (less than one second maybe?) after dd finishes, whereas I've seen regular dd finish tens of seconds before my usb stick stopped blinking it's LED. Still if you wait for that long the result will be the same.