Re: [RFC][PATCH -mm] Freezer: Handle uninterruptible tasks

From: Pavel Machek
Date: Sun Jul 08 2007 - 08:23:21 EST


Hi!

> > And then you will face the problem of a user task doing I/O during
> > hibernate after the atomic snapshot has been made.
>
> I don't think that this is possible in normal conditions. It would be possible
> if, for example, the task were waiting for an unavailable resource and that
> resource became available after the hibernation image had been created.
> In that case, however, to do any damage, the task would have to cause some
> filesystem-related data to be flushed in the same syscall (ie. before returning
> to user space).

I agree that it is relatively unlikely to trigger (if you avoid
freezing the tasks that were uninterruptible for long), but it will
trigger in error cases etc.

> Such situations may be prevented by a mechanizm detecting if any uniterruptible
> and freezing task has been woken up after creating the image and aborting the
> hibernation in that cases. For this purpose, we only need to add an
> appropriate condition to try_to_wake_up() and make it start to trigger after,
> for example, enabling the nonboot CPUs.

I don't know how to do that mechanism... but if we knew where to trap
filesystem writes, we could simply freeze at that point, and at that
point only, no?
Pavel
--
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html
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