Re: [PATCH] Fix vmtruncate race and distributed filesystem race

[Andrea Arcangeli]

On Mon, Jun 23, 2003 at 12:56:23AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Andrea Arcangeli <[e-mail]> wrote:
> >
> > that will finally close the race
> 
> Could someone please convince me that we really _need_ to close it?
> 
> The VM handles the whacky pages OK (on slowpaths), and when this first came
> up two years ago it was argued that the application was racy/buggy
> anyway.  So as long as we're secure and stable, we don't care.  Certainly
> not to the point of adding more atomic ops on the fastpath.
> 
> So...   what bug are we actually fixing here?

we're fixing userspace data corruption with an app trapping SIGBUS.

> 
> 
> (I'd also like to see a clearer description of the distributed fs problem,
> and how this fixes it).

I certainly would like discussions about it too.

Andrea