Hi, On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 10:45 AM, Phillip Susi <psusi@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > Various tools, but most notably partitioners, manipulate disks in such > a way that they need to prevent the rest of the system from racing > with them while they are in the middle of manipulating the disk. > Presently this is done with a hodge podge of hacks that involve > running some script or executable to temporarily hold off on some > aspects ( typically only auto mounting ) of plug and play processing. > Which one depends on whether you are running hal, udisks, udisks2, or > systemd. > > There really needs to be a proper way at a lower level, either udev, > or maybe in the kernel, to inhibit processing events until the tool > changing the device has finished completely. The question is, should > this be in the kernel, or in udev, and what should the interface be? When I was younger I used to think things like this was a good idea and, in fact, did a lot of work to add complex interfaces for this in the various components you mention. These interfaces didn't really work well, someone would always complain that this or that edge-case didn't work. Or some other desktop environment ended up not using the interfaces. Or some kernel hacker running twm (with "carefully" selected bits of GNOME or KDE to get automounting) ran into problems. It was awful. Just awful. What _did_ turn out to work really well - and what GNOME is using today and have been for the last couple of years - is that the should_automount flag [1] is set only if, and only if, the device the volume is on, has been added within the last five seconds [2]. It's incredibly simple (and low-tech). And judging from bug reports, it works really well. So please don't add complicated inhibit interfaces. They're probably not going to work and probably not everybody is going to use them. Thanks, David [1] : as used in GNOME and probably things like Ubuntu Unity and XFCE as well, see https://developer.gnome.org/gio/2.35/GVolume.html#g-volume-should-automount [2] : this is where should_automount is being set https://git.gnome.org/browse/gvfs/tree/monitor/udisks2/gvfsudisks2volume.c?id=1.17.2#n377 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-hotplug" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
