Re: ramdisk driver in 2.6.6 has a severe bug

From: viro
Date: Mon May 17 2004 - 19:51:49 EST


On Mon, May 17, 2004 at 05:04:33PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> "Robert M. Stockmann" <stock@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > Be aware of other problems when using the linux ramdisk driver,
> > loosing its contents. Especially the use of mkinitrd might result in
> > unexpected problems. googling for "kernel 2.6.6 ramdisk problem" shows lots
> > of people with problems mounting their root filesystems and loading modules
> > from ramdisk. Klaus Knopper (knoppix) is not amused, neither am i :)
>
> Well in that case perhaps something else broke. I've seen no such reports
> of recent regressions in the ramdisk driver.
>
> The two problems of which I am aware are:
>
> a) It loses its brains across umount. Seems that it's very rare that
> anyone actually cares about this, which is why it has not been fixed in
> well over a year.

Details, please. The only case I'm aware of is when you have fs-set
block size different from the one we had before mount(2). And in that
case it would lose its brains when the blocksize had been flipped in
the first place. Which would tend to fail mount(2) anyway.
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