Actually, we made postgres use sync_file_range() for checkpointing if available in 9.6. Not for durability - there's a few to many caveats in the manpage - but to control how much work a later fsync() has to do. In many workloads checkpointing can generate a lot of writes, and the OS's writeback caching of those can generate a lot of dirty buffers in the kernel's page cache. If the kernel decides to flush those (on it's own or due to an fsync), latency for every other FS operation can skyrocket. We've seen stalls in the 10s of minutes. So we now regularly sync_file_range(SYNC_FILE_RANGE_WRITE), unless the feature is disabled of course, to control how much dirty data the kernel has.

See http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit;... and http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit;...