On Tue, 3 May 2011 00:20:20 +0200 Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx> wrote: > On Mon 02-05-11 14:12:30, Andrew Morton wrote: > > On Mon, 2 May 2011 22:56:56 +0200 > > Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > > So far, ext3 was allocating necessary blocks for mmapped writes when > > > writepage() was called. There are several issues with this. The worst > > > being that user is allowed to arbitrarily exceed disk quotas because > > > writepage() is called from flusher thread context (which is root) and thus > > > quota limits are ignored. Another bad consequence is that data is just lost > > > if we find there's no space on the filesystem during ->writepage() time. > > > > > > We solve these issues by implementing block reservation in page_mkwrite() > > > callback. We don't want to really allocate blocks on page_mkwrite() time > > > because for random writes via mmap (as seen for example with applications using > > > BerkeleyDB) it results in much more fragmented files and thus much worse > > > performance. So we allocate indirect blocks and reserve space for data block in > > > page_mkwrite() and do the allocation of data block from writepage(). > > > > Yes, instantiating the metadata and accounting the data is a good > > approach. The file layout will be a bit suboptimal, but surely that > > will be a minor thing. > > > > But boy, it's a complicated patch! Are we really sure that we want to > > make changes this extensive to our antiquated old fs? Or do we just > > say "yeah, it's broken with quotas - use ext4"? > The patch isn't trivial, I agree (although it's mostly straightforward). > Regarding telling users to switch to ext4 - it seems a bit harsh to me > to ask people to switch to ext4 as a response to a (possibly security) > issue they uncover. Because for most admins switching to ext4 will require > some non-trivial testing I presume. Of course, the counterweight is the > possibility of new bugs introduced to the code by my patch. Yes. > But after some > considerations I've decided it's worth it and and fixed the bug... Well. How did you come to that decision? Are real users hurting from this problem? What's the real-world case for fixing it? -- 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
