Comment 318 for bug 620074

Just tried dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile bs=1M count=20k conv=fdatasync on 2.6.30-rc2 and top still shows iowait of 70% to 90%, on ext3 filesystem.

Motherboard: Gigabyte M57SLI-S4
Distro: Slamd64 12.2

$ cat /proc/meminfo | grep MemTotal
MemTotal: 3089672 kB

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep -i "Model name" | uniq
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+

sda:

 Model=WDC WD5000AAKS-00TMA0, FwRev=12.01C01, SerialNo=WD-WCAPW4009869
 UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5 *udma6

I believe the ext3 partition was mounted with data=writeback option, but can reboot and confirm if it is important enough.