[Bug 216322] Freezing of tasks failed after 60.004 seconds (1 tasks refusing to freeze... task:fstrim ext4_trim_fs - Dell XPS 13 9310

[bugzilla-daemon@kernel.org]

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=216322

--- Comment #3 from Theodore Tso (tytso@mit.edu) ---
The other consideration is if there is some other userspace application other
than util-linux which is using the FITRIM ioctl --- for example, what if
systemd decided it needed to reimplement fstrim the way it's reimplemented
syslogd, ntpd, etc., etc., etc.?     In which case, if we change FITRIM so that
if it gets a signal or if the system tries to suspend itself, it will return
EAGAIN and fstrim_range.len will have the number of bytes trimmed so far ---
this might cause the systemd-reimplementation (or any other hypothetical users
of FITRIM) to break if there is a suspend-to-ram happening at an inopportune
time.

So which is worse?   

1)   Leaving suspend-to-ram broken if the user is unlucky enough to try to
suspend their laptop while fstrim is run automatically by systemd or out of
crontab?   

2)   Breaking random userspace programs that use FITRIM so they doesn't
complete the requested file system/SSD maintenance if the user tries to suspend
their laptop while that program happens to be running?   (We can fix the
userspace programs which use FITRIM so they handle the EAGAIN error return as
we find them, of course.   At the moment, it's only util-linux as far as I
know.)

In the long term, #2 seems like the best approach, IMHO.  OTOH, it could be
argued that we've lived with this for years and years and years, and no one has
noticed up until now.

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