Re: wait queue process state

["Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Wed, May 29, 2002 at 12:56:03PM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
> 
> alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk said:
> >  Given an infinite number of monkeys yes. The 'disk I/O is not
> > interruptible' assumption is buried in vast amounts of software. This
> > isnt a case of sorting out a few misbehaving applications, you can
> > start with some of the most basic unix programs like 'ed' and work
> > outwards.
> 
> Still probably worth doing in the long term. In the short term, we could 
> possibly have a sysctl or personality flag to disable it for the benefit of 
> broken software. I'm in favour of just letting it break though, to be 
> honest - it's _already_ possible to trigger the breakage in some 
> circumstances and making it more reproducible is a _good_ thing.

If you really think this is important thing to do, I suggest you
create a kernel patch which returns a partial read/write whenever the
the size is even (and return an odd number of bytes), thus
guaranteeing that 50% of the time, any I/O appears to have been
interrupted.

Then run it on a system, and see what breaks.  I wouldn't suggest
doing this on any system that you care about, though!

							- Ted