In either case, the advice given in the article and by the OP is filesystem agnostic.
I feel that operating systems need to provide self-contained reliable APIs designed for atomically overwriting configuration files, without losing permissions or overwriting symlinks or such. Or perhaps supply more powerful primitives, like a faster/weaker fsync that serves as an ordering barrier rather than flushing to disk, or an API to replace a file without altering permissions. One issue I've heard is:
> I even had an issue with atomic writes over ssh that created the temp file but where not able to rename it, so the old one stayed.
manhandling /dev/nvme0 seems equally likely to corrupt data in the event of a power failure.
Doesn’t mean it isn’t easier to deal with as a file from an administration perspective (and you can do snapshots, or whatever!), but Lvm can do that too for a block device, and many other things.
Do you have numbers showing an advantage of going directly to the block device? Personally, I'd consider the management advantages of a filesystem compelling absent specific performance numbers showing the benefit of direct partition access.
I'm able to saturate a PCIe 3.0 x4 link doing direct IO to an NVMe drive with a single 1.7 GHz Power PC core without breaking a sweat. This is through ext4.
My accesses are sequential though. Maybe there's more of a penalty with random IO.
