Kernel quality control, or the lack thereof

Posted Dec 9, 2018 1:46 UTC (Sun) by luto (guest, #39314)
Parent article: Kernel quality control, or the lack thereof

This reminds me of a bug I found once. In a -rc4 kernel, I decided to play with the new O_TMPFILE feature. My first basic experiment resulted in fs corruption:

https://lwn.net/Articles/562296/

Kernel quality control, or the lack thereof

Posted Dec 20, 2018 12:26 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

That reminds me of a bug I found in Fortran 77 for Univac ... which led to data loss.

The guys at the company I was contracted to were trying to abstract out the OS-specific features, like in the OPEN statement. You could declare a file as temporary, which led to it disappearing when it got closed - quite a nice feature IF IMPLEMENTED CORRECTLY!

So, I opened a temporary file on a FUNIT, then later on re-used the same FUNIT for a permanent file. THE OS DIDN'T CLEAR THE TEMPORARY STATUS. So when I closed the permanent file, it disappeared ... :-)

Cheers,
Wol