Re: test12-pre5

["Stephen C. Tweedie" <sct@redhat.com>]

Hi,

On Tue, Dec 05, 2000 at 03:17:07PM -0500, Alexander Viro wrote:
> 
> 
> On Tue, 5 Dec 2000, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> > And this is not just a "it happens to be like this" kind of thing. It
> > _has_ to be like this, because every time we call clear_inode() we are
> > going to physically free the memory associated with the inode very soon
> > afterwards. Which means that _any_ use of the inode had better be long
> > gone. Dirty buffers included.
> 
> Urgh. Linus, AFAICS we _all_ agree on that. The only real question is
> whether we consider calling clear_inode() with droppable dirty buffers
> to be OK. It can't happen on the dispose_list() path and I'ld rather
> see it _not_ happening on the delete_inode() one. It's a policy question,
> not the correctness one.

Right, because if we get this wrong, the kernel won't complain, but
we'll have a rare, impossible-to-diagnose potential data corrupter for
any applications which do recovery on reboot.  

If we're not going to change the code, then at the very least a huge
warning comment above clear_inode() is necessary to make it explicit
that you shouldn't ever pass in an inode with dirty buffers unless
nlink==0, and I'd rather see the BUG there instead.

--Stephen
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