Re: USB: on suspend to ram/disk all usb devices are replugged

[Rafael J. Wysocki]

On Monday, 2 April 2007 04:54, Alan Stern wrote:
> On Sun, 1 Apr 2007, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > On Sunday, 1 April 2007 20:34, Pavel Machek wrote:
> > > Hi!
> > > 
> > > > > Problem is that suspending _with_ removable mass storage devices
> > > > > attached just will not work. User will unplug them, then complain
> > > > > about corruption. Advanced user will unplug them, work with them
> > > > > somewhere else, replug them, then loose filesystem.
> > > > > 
> > > > > Feel free to send patch to teach filesystems to handle this.
> > > > 
> > > > Actually what's needed is a Persistent Logical Volume Manager.  With it,
> > > > you could even mount a filesystem on a USB device, unplug the device, plug
> > > > it back into a different port, and still be able to use the filesystem.
> > > > 
> > > > But you're still likely to run into trouble if you unplug a storage
> > > > device, move it to another system and write on it, then plug it back into
> > > > the original system.  The PLVM would somehow have to recognize that the
> > > > data had been changed.  I don't know a foolproof way of doing that.
> > > 
> > > Such detection should be possible when done at filesystem level.
> > > 
> > > I.e. ext3 would notice that someone replayed the journal.
> > > 
> > > Or we could create ext5 where each r/w mount would update mount
> > > time... actually we probably already have last mount time in ext3,
> > > so...
> > 
> > I'm thinking we'll need to introduce something like freezing notifiers, ie.
> > the ability to register a notifier by an interested subsystem that will be
> > called right after user space processes have been frozen and right before
> > we start to thaw them (that may allow us to handle the microcode issue in
> > a clean way, for example).
> > 
> > Now if a filesystem registers a freezing notifier, it may be unmounted during
> > the suspend and remounted during the resume in more or less transparent
> > way.  I think an additional mount flag would be needed for filesystem that
> > should install such notifiers, like "removable".
> 
> "Unmounted" and "remounted" aren't quite the right words.  All you really
> need to do is check (during the resume) that the superblock is still in
> the same state as it was when the suspend occurred.

Yes, I was thinking of something more sophisticated, but this is what we need.

> After all, if someone 
> else had mounted the dirty filesystem during the interim, they surely
> would have altered the superblock.  Note that even a read-only mount of a
> dirty ext3 filesystem will recover the journal; presumably that will alter
> the superblock too.
> 
> I don't think a "removable" flag is needed.  There's no reason not to do 
> this for every mounted filesystem.

Well, I'm afraid about such filesystems as vfat ...

> (Also "removable" isn't the right word either, since hot-pluggable devices 
> with non-removable media would need the same treatment.  In fact, while 
> the system is hibernating someone could even remove an internal IDE drive 
> and then put it back!)

I meant the filesystems could be marked as "removable" rather than the
devices containing them, so that the users could tell us which filesystems
might need special handling.

> One final nit:  It's possible for someone to alter the data sectors 
> directly, without mounting the filesystem.  This is sufficiently perverse 
> that we probably shouldn't worry about it.

Agreed.

Greetings,
Rafael
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