Re: [PATCH] SMP race in ext2 - metadata corruption.

[Andrzej Krzysztofowicz]

> 
> Note that I think all these arguments are fairly bogus.  Doing things like
> "dump" on a live filesystem is stupid and dangerous (in my opinion it is
> stupid and dangerous to use "dump" at _all_, but that's a whole 'nother
> discussion in itself), and there really are no valid uses for opening a
> block device that is already mounted. More importantly, I don't think
> anybody actually does.

I know a few people that often do:

dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdc1
e2fsck /dev/hdc1

to make an "exact" copy of a currently working system.

Maybe it is stupid, but they do.
Fortunately, their systems are not SMP...

Andrzej