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SubjectRe: [PATCH] Use of getblk differs between locations
FromAnton Altaparmakov <>
DateTue, 11 Oct 2005 09:01:19 +0100
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On Mon, 2005-10-10 at 18:07 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
Mikulas Patocka <mikulas@artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz> wrote:

On Mon, 10 Oct 2005, Andrew Morton wrote:

Anton Altaparmakov <aia21@cam.ac.uk> wrote:

Maybe the best solution is neither one nor another. Testing and failing gracefully seems better.

What do you think?

I certainly agree with you there. I neither want a deadlock nor corruption. (-:

Yup. In the present implementation __getblk_slow() "cannot fail". It's conceivable that at some future stage we'll change __getblk_slow() so that it returns NULL on an out-of-memory condition.

The question is if it is desired --- it will make bread return NULL on out-of-memory condition, callers will treat it like an IO error, skipping access to the affected block, causing damage on perfectly healthy filesystem.

Yes, that is a bit dumb. A filesystem might indeed want to take different action for ENOMEM versus EIO.

I liked what linux-2.0 did in this case --- if the kernel was out of memory, getblk just took another buffer, wrote it if it was dirty and used it. Except for writeable loopback device (where writing one buffer generates more dirty buffers), it couldn't deadlock.

Wouldn't it be better if bread() were to return ERR_PTR(-EIO) or ERR_PTR(-ENOMEM)? Big change.

It would indeed. Much better. And whilst at it, it would be even better if we had a lot more error codes like "ERR_PTR(-EDEVUNPLUGGED)" for example... But that would be an even better change. Anyone feeling like touching every block driver in the kernel? (-;
Best regards,

Anton
-- 
Anton Altaparmakov <aia21 at cam.ac.uk> (replace at with @)
Unix Support, Computing Service, University of Cambridge, CB2 3QH, UK
Linux NTFS maintainer / IRC: #ntfs on irc.freenode.net
WWW: http://linux-ntfs.sf.net/ & http://www-stu.christs.cam.ac.uk/~aia21/

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