On Tuesday, July 07, 2015 03:16:48 PM Oliver Neukum wrote: > On Tue, 2015-07-07 at 14:14 +0200, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote: > > For example, on desktop systems I use user space syncs filesystems > > before > > writing to /sys/power/state, so the additional sys_sync() in the > > kernel doesn't > > seem to serve any purpose. > > There is a race you cannot close in user space.
Yes, there is, but I'm not sure how much of a help the sync in the kernel provides here anyway. Say this happens. There is a process writing to a file running in parallel with the suspend process. Suspend starts and that process is frozen. The sync is called and causes all of the outstanding data to be written back. The user doesn't realize that the write is technically still in progress, so he (or she) pulls the storage device out of the system, moves it to another system, makes changes (say removes the file written to by the process above, so the blocks previously occupied by that file are now used for some metadata) and moves the storage back to the suspended system. The system is resumed and the writing process continues writing possibly to the wrong blocks and corrupts the filesystem. Is this possible? If not, why not? Rafael -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
