Re: [PATCH 3/3] Add timeout feature

Brad Boyer
2008-07-09T05:50:00Z

On Tue, Jul 08, 2008 at 09:09:22PM -0400, Theodore Tso wrote:
> I had argued for the timeout (and so it's mostly my fault that
> Takashi-San included it as a feature) mainly because I was (and still
> amm) deeply paranoid about the competence of the application
> programers who might use this feature. I could see them screwing up
> leaving it locked forever --- perhaps when their program core dumps or
> when the user types ^C and they forgot to install a signal handler,
> leaving the filesystem frozen forever.
>
> In the meantime, user applications that try to create files on that
> filesystem, or write to files already opened when the filesystem are
> frozen will accumulate dirty pages in the page cache, until the system
> finally falls over.
>
> Think about some of the evil perpetrated by hal and the userspace
> suspend-resume scripts (and how much complexity with random XML
> fragments getting parsed by various dbus plugins), and tell me with a
> straight face that you would trust these modern-day desktop
> application writers with this interface. Because they *will* find
> some interesting way to (ab)use it.....
>
> Also, I didn't think the extra code complexity to implements timeouts
> was *that* bad --- it seemed fairly small for the functionality.

Just as an extra point of reference, VxFS supports a freeze/thaw by
ioctl very similar to this including a timeout in seconds. This
means someone else thought it was a useful feature.

http://sfdoccentral.symantec.com/sf/5.0/linux/manpages/vxfs/vxfsio_7.html

Brad Boyer
flar@allandria.com