Re: [PATCH] SMP race in ext2 - metadata corruption.

From: volodya@mindspring.com
Date: Thu May 03 2001 - 01:23:35 EST


On Thu, 26 Apr 2001, Linus Torvalds wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, 26 Apr 2001, Alexander Viro wrote:
> > On Thu, 26 Apr 2001, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> > >
> > > how can the read in progress see a branch that we didn't spliced yet? We
> >
> > fd = open("/dev/hda1", O_RDONLY);
> > read(fd, buf, sizeof(buf));
>
> Note that I think all these arguments are fairly bogus. Doing things like
> "dump" on a live filesystem is stupid and dangerous (in my opinion it is
> stupid and dangerous to use "dump" at _all_, but that's a whole 'nother
> discussion in itself), and there really are no valid uses for opening a
> block device that is already mounted. More importantly, I don't think
> anybody actually does.

Actually I did. I might do it again :) The point was to get the kernel to
cache certain blocks in the RAM.

                                     Vladimir Dergachev

>
> The fact that you _can_ do so makes the patch valid, and I do agree with
> Al on the "least surprise" issue. I've already applied the patch, in fact.
> But the fact is that nobody should ever do the thing that could cause
> problems.
>
> Linus
>
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
> Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
>

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon May 07 2001 - 21:00:15 EST