Ext3 users - Nov 2001 - Re: VFS bug in 2.4.10+ which applies ulimits to block devices

On Mon, Nov 26, 2001 at 10:00:39PM +0800, Yusuf Goolamabbas
wrote:
> Hi Andrea, The following is a thread on ext3-users in which sct mentions
> that this is due to a core VFS bug introduced in 2.4.10 which applies
> ulimits to block devices. Maybe this could be due to some interaction
> with your blockdevice in pagecache
> 
> I don't know if you already have a fix in your tree. Maybe sct can
> provide you with more info
You need to upgrade glibc to something recent like 2.2.1, so that the
ulimit will be correctly set to ~0UL. We could also fix this problem in
the kernel but even if we do you will still run into troubles with LFS
with the mounted filesystems.

Or maybe you run really play with the blkdev with file limits not set to
unlimited? I think it's insane to set file limits for root during boot,
the only problem I know of were because of the old userspace that
doesn't handle correctly the new ulimited defines ~0UL instead of
~0UL>>1.

We can provide total backwards compatibility with a simple IS_BLK check
in generic_file_* in filemap.c, but I'm not sure if it really worth to
add a branch there just for this.

Andrea

Hi,

On Mon, Nov 26, 2001 at 03:26:17PM +0100, Andrea Arcangeli
wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 26, 2001 at 10:00:39PM +0800, Yusuf Goolamabbas wrote:
> > Hi Andrea, The following is a thread on ext3-users in which sct
mentions
> > that this is due to a core VFS bug introduced in 2.4.10 which applies
> > ulimits to block devices. Maybe this could be due to some interaction
> > with your blockdevice in pagecache
> > 
> > I don't know if you already have a fix in your tree. Maybe sct can
> > provide you with more info
> 
> You need to upgrade glibc to something recent like 2.2.1, so that the
> ulimit will be correctly set to ~0UL. We could also fix this problem in
> the kernel but even if we do you will still run into troubles with LFS
> with the mounted filesystems.
I don't think that we should be applying _any_ of the LFS or ulimit
logic to device inodes, should we?  It's not as if we're allocating
space by writing beyond the ulimit max offset in this case.

Cheers,
 Stephen