Re: Deleting large files

[Pavel Machek]

On Wed 2008-05-07 19:14:33, Morten Welinder wrote:
> >  Suppose you had an N GB file that just filled up the disk. You now
> >  delete it, but get control back before it is really deleted. You
> >  now start to write a new file that will eventually just fill up
> >  the disk. [...]
> 
> That argument ought to stop right there.  If you believe that deleting a
> file will necessarily and immediately give you back the space, then you
> are wrong in the current state of the affairs already.

Not if you are the only user.

> user experience.  Forking a process to do the deletion (a) is pathetic,
> (b) is not currently done, and (c) does not work: you cannot get a result
> right away, i.e., you lose error handling.

If you fork a kernel thread, you lose error handling, too.

Think -EIO when writing back bitmaps...

(Hmm, you'd have to use O_SYNC to see that, so this is probably
minor).

I guess doing freeing asynchronously would be okay in the 'close'
case...

							Pavel
-- 
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html
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