There is still a race ? [LWN.net]

There is still a race ?

Posted Jan 3, 2007 5:01 UTC (Wed) by mikov (guest, #33179)
Parent article: A nasty file corruption bug - fixed

Linus says that "it still has a tiny tiny race (see the comment), but I
bet nobody can really hit it in real life anyway, and I know several ways
to fix it, so I'm not really _that_ worried about it."

This worries me a bit. Things that are never supposed to happen usually
happen first :-) Are they planning to fix that race ?

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There is still a race ?

Posted Jan 6, 2007 4:07 UTC (Sat) by Lovechild (guest, #3592) [Link] (1 responses)

The following is my take, seeing as I'm a retard baby compared to actual kernel hackers I might be wrong.

If it's a strictly theorically race and the fix means an overhead, it's often left with a comment to say 'here be dragons' so that if someone actually manage to hit it with a valid test case then it can be fixed. No need to endure overhead here and there for things that happen only in theory, it all adds up you know. Also adding code tends to cause more bugs to appear in sutle ways, adds to the complexity of reading and working with the codebase.

There is still a race ?

Posted Jan 6, 2007 17:11 UTC (Sat) by i3839 (guest, #31386) [Link]

I believe I read that this race, if it happened, would cause a writeout to happen twice, instead of only once. It wouldn't cause a writeout to be dropped, so this race can's cause corruption.

There is still a race ?

Posted Jan 8, 2007 13:43 UTC (Mon) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link]

I interpreted the comment to mean "don't let the fact there's a tiny race here stop you from trying out this intermediate, incomplete patch. I know how to fix the race, and presumably anything in its final form would do so."