diff mbox series

[4/6] block: propagate BLKROSET on the whole device to all partitions

Message ID 20201207131918.2252553-5-hch@lst.de
State Superseded
Headers show
Series [1/6] dm: use bdev_read_only to check if a device is read-only | expand

Commit Message

Christoph Hellwig Dec. 7, 2020, 1:19 p.m. UTC
Change the policy so that a BLKROSET on the whole device also affects
partitions.  To quote Martin K. Petersen:

It's very common for database folks to twiddle the read-only state of
block devices and partitions. I know that our users will find it very
counter-intuitive that setting /dev/sda read-only won't prevent writes
to /dev/sda1.

The existing behavior is inconsistent in the sense that doing:

permits writes. But:

<something triggers revalidate>

doesn't.

And a subsequent:

doesn't work either since sda1's read-only policy has been inherited
from the whole-disk device.

You need to do:

after setting the whole-disk device rw to effectuate the same change on
the partitions, otherwise they are stuck being read-only indefinitely.

However, setting the read-only policy on a partition does *not* require
the revalidate step. As a matter of fact, doing the revalidate will blow
away the policy setting you just made.

So the user needs to take different actions depending on whether they
are trying to read-protect a whole-disk device or a partition. Despite
using the same ioctl. That is really confusing.

I have lost count how many times our customers have had data clobbered
because of ambiguity of the existing whole-disk device policy. The
current behavior violates the principle of least surprise by letting the
user think they write protected the whole disk when they actually
didn't.

Suggested-by: Martin K. Petersen <martin.petersen@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
---
 block/genhd.c | 3 +--
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 2 deletions(-)

Comments

Ming Lei Dec. 9, 2020, 1:23 a.m. UTC | #1
On Tue, Dec 08, 2020 at 11:59:27AM +0100, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 08, 2020 at 06:29:23PM +0800, Ming Lei wrote:

> > > -		test_bit(GD_READ_ONLY, &bdev->bd_disk->state);

> > > +	return bdev->bd_read_only || get_disk_ro(bdev->bd_disk);

> > >  }

> > >  EXPORT_SYMBOL(bdev_read_only);

> > 

> > I think this patch should be folded into previous one, otherwise

> > bdev_read_only(part) may return false even though ioctl(BLKROSET)

> > has been done on the whole disk.

> 

> The above is the existing behavior going back back very far, and I feel

> much more comfortable having a small self-contained patch that changes

> this behavior.

> 


OK, then looks fine:

Reviewed-by: Ming Lei <ming.lei@redhat.com>


-- 
Ming
diff mbox series

Patch

diff --git a/block/genhd.c b/block/genhd.c
index 878f94727aaa96..c214fcd25a05c9 100644
--- a/block/genhd.c
+++ b/block/genhd.c
@@ -1449,8 +1449,7 @@  EXPORT_SYMBOL(set_disk_ro);
 
 int bdev_read_only(struct block_device *bdev)
 {
-	return bdev->bd_read_only ||
-		test_bit(GD_READ_ONLY, &bdev->bd_disk->state);
+	return bdev->bd_read_only || get_disk_ro(bdev->bd_disk);
 }
 EXPORT_SYMBOL(bdev_read_only);