Re:A warning about 5.12-rc1
by dale_glass on Friday March 05, 2021 @12:45PM
(#26359619)
Such guarantees aren't easy.
And come on, "writing a single block"? No, that's what it looks like on the user side of things. In the kernel it's going to be a good deal more complicated, because how does anything know anything about this block you just added? You need to keep track of it somehow.
Inside the kernel you need to go find some free space to use for this extra block, and to update whatever metadata is needed to make things consistent. It might well turn out that the block you're using to keep track of what blocks belong to this file is just full, so now you have to allocate another block for filesystem metadata. Then there's issues like journalling. And doing all that while providing the guarantee that you won't need to allocate memory is likely tricky.
And come on, "writing a single block"? No, that's what it looks like on the user side of things. In the kernel it's going to be a good deal more complicated, because how does anything know anything about this block you just added? You need to keep track of it somehow.
Inside the kernel you need to go find some free space to use for this extra block, and to update whatever metadata is needed to make things consistent. It might well turn out that the block you're using to keep track of what blocks belong to this file is just full, so now you have to allocate another block for filesystem metadata. Then there's issues like journalling. And doing all that while providing the guarantee that you won't need to allocate memory is likely tricky.