Re: NBD Cleanup patch and bugfix in ll_rw_blk.c

Linus Torvalds
2001-02-28T23:30:15Z

On Wed, 28 Feb 2001, Steve Whitehouse wrote:
>
> I tested the patch with a printk() which printed whenever the new call to the
> request function was triggered. It didn't happen once in normal fs use
> with ext2 on a scsi disk.

As far as I can tell, the patch will trigger only for a not-empty request
list, where the elevator decides to put the new request at the head of the
queue.

Which is probably unlikely (and with the current elevator it might even be
impossible). But it does not look impossible in theory. And I'd really
prefer _not_ to have something that
- looks completely bogus from a design standpoint
- might be buggy under some rather unlikely circumstances

Reading them together they become "might cause disk corruption in some
really hard-to-trigger circumstances". No, thank you.

Note that I suspect that all current drivers (or at least the common ones)
have protection against being called multiple times, simply because 2.2.x
used to do it. Which again means that you'd probably never see problems
in practice. But that doesn't make it _right_.

Linus