On Oct 29, 2011, at 6:52 PM, "Peter Teoh" <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 29, 2011 at 6:03 AM, Mike Gibson
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> I'm updating a user space program that finds free blocks on a ext2/3 
>> filesystem so that it works with ext4.  I'm concerned about how extents 
>> might affect my program.  My program currently looks only at the block 
>> allocation bitmaps.  Are the block allocation bitmaps still updated when an 
>> extent is created?
>> 
> 
> problem is what u see as free blocks may not be seen at the kernel
> level as free block.....since u not holding any locks, there may be
> situation when your block allocation may conflict with that of the
> kernel, then u will get disastrous irrecoverable errors - worst case
> is your userspace data get overwritten by kernel.
> 
> i supposed it is a legacy program, but there exists a small
> probability that this problem will occur.

This is only used when the filesystem is offline, so I'm only interested in the 
on disk structure.

Mike Gibson


_______________________________________________
Kernelnewbies mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.kernelnewbies.org/mailman/listinfo/kernelnewbies

Reply via email to