Re: Top 10 bugs/warnings for the week of March 23rd, 2008

From: Ingo Molnar
Date: Mon May 26 2008 - 12:49:37 EST



* Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> just fine, as far as I understand. It only spits a dangerously looking
> warning and that's it. I agree we shouldn't be doing this but I don't
> really find this a critical problem.

yeah i know it's "just" a warning, i checked the stack dump on
kerneloops.org before i wrote the mail.

Pulling removable media out while it might still be mounted is a fact of
life and comes not from the stupidity of the user but from the lack of
physical barriers on the device side.

What if the USB stick was pulled mistakenly, the user notices her
mistake later on and plugs the USB stick back in and expects all the
data to not be corrupted?

What if the user puts the stick back in and it wont be mounted or will
be critically damaged?

How do we even know whether these cases all work 100% robustly if the
attitude is that removing a mounted device is a stupid thing to do and a
bug related to it gets deprioritized? [starting with the issue of why
the user should even care about such a relatively low-level abstraction
as a "mounted filesystem".]

And any such problems do come up in the enterprise space as well, in
terms of multipath IO issues - and Linux still does quite poorly in that
area.

Ingo
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