Christoph Hellwig wrote: > On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 09:36:04AM -0500, Eric Sandeen wrote: >> Christoph Hellwig wrote: >>> On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 05:52:35PM +0900, Takashi Sato wrote: >>>> I think that your concern is that the freezer cannot recognize the occurrence >>>> of a timeout and it continues the backup process and the backup data is >>>> corrupted finally. >>> What timeout should happen? the freeze ioctl must not return until the >>> filesystem is a clean state and all writes are blocked. >> The suggestion was that *UN*freeze would return ETIMEDOUT if the >> filesystem had already unfrozen itself, I think. That way you know that >> the snapshot you just took is worthless, at least. > > But why would the filesystem every unfreeze itself? That defeats the > whole point of freezing it. I agree. Was just trying to clarify the above point. But there have been what, 12 submissions now, with the unfreeze timeout in place so it's a persistent theme ;) Perhaps a demonstration of just how easy (or not easy) it is to deadlock a filesystem by freezing the root might be in order, at least. And even if it is relatively easy, I still maintain that it is the administrator's role to not inflict damage on the machine being administered. There are a lot of potentially dangerous tools at root's disposal; why this particular one needs a nanny I'm still not quite sure. -Eric -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
