--On Wednesday, May 14, 2003 08:06:53 -0700 William Lee Irwin III
<wli@holomorphy.com> wrote:
>> Which the application thinks is still part of the file, and will expect
>> its changes to be written back. Granted, if the page fault occurred
>> just after the truncate it'd get SIGBUS, so it's clearly not a robust
>> assumption, but it will result in unexpected behavior. Note that if the
>> application later extends the file to include this page it could result
>> in a corrupted file, since all the pages around it will be written
>> properly.
>
> Well, for this one I'd say the app loses; it was its own failure to
> synchronize truncation vs. access, at least given that the kernel
> doesn't oops.
I think allowing a race condition that can randomly leave corrupted files
is a really bad idea, even if the app is doing something stupid. We know
what the race is. We should be able to prevent it.
Dave
======================================================================
Dave McCracken IBM Linux Base Kernel Team 1-512-838-3059
dmccr@us.ibm.com T/L 678-3059
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