Re: [PATCH] hugetlbfs read() support

From: Nick Piggin
Date: Fri Jul 20 2007 - 21:23:53 EST


Andrew Morton wrote:
On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 08:51:49 -0700 Badari Pulavarty <pbadari@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

This code doesn't have all the ghastly tricks which we deploy to handle
concurrent truncate.

Do I need to ? Baaahh!! I don't want to deal with them.


Nick, can you think of any serious consequences of a read/truncate race in
there? I can't..

As it doesn't allow writes, then I _think_ it should be OK. If you
ever did want to add write(2) support, then you would have transient
zeroes problems.

But I'm not completely sure.. we've had a lot of (and still have
some known and probably unknown) bugs just in that single
generic_mapping_read function, most of which are due to our rabid
aversion to doing any locking whatsoever there.

So why not just hold i_mutex around the whole thing to be safe?

--
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.
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