Re: Weirdness of "mount -o remount,rw" with write-protected floppy

From: Evgeny Stambulchik
Date: Fri Oct 28 2005 - 09:52:16 EST


Rob Landley wrote:

You're forgetting the cacheing (dentry and page caches).

We have a writeable filesystem mounted on a read-only block device. This is an impossible situation we should never have gotten into in the first place. That's the bug.

For performance reasons, the write stuffs the data into the page cache, and returns long before the system even attempts to write the data to disk. (Unless you mount the filesystem O_SYNC, which will kill performance.)

You're right, when I mount the floppy with "-o sync", touch fails immediately (I did try earlier sync(1), as somebody suggested, and it didn't matter; yes, I know about the difference between sync(2) and fsync(2)). On the other hand, umount is supposed to flush all the data by the time it returns yet still it succeeded.

But overall I agree that we're discussing a situation which should never happen in the first place, i.e. remount should fail.

Regards,

Evgeny
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