From: Jamie Lokier Subject: Re: [PATCH] Use of getblk differs between locations Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2005 01:09:21 +0100 Message-ID: <20051013000921.GD23770@mail.shareable.org> References: <20051010214605.GA11427@br.ibm.com> <1129017155.12336.4.camel@imp.csi.cam.ac.uk> <434D6932.1040703@suse.com> <434D6CFA.4080802@suse.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: Jeff Mahoney , Anton Altaparmakov , Glauber de Oliveira Costa , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, ext2-devel@lists.sourceforge.net, hirofumi@mail.parknet.co.jp, linux-ntfs-dev@lists.sourceforge.net, aia21@cantab.net, hch@infradead.org, viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk, akpm@osdl.org Return-path: To: Mikulas Patocka Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-fsdevel.vger.kernel.org Mikulas Patocka wrote: > But discarding data sometimes on USB unplug is even worse than discarding > data always --- users will by experimenting learn that linux doesn't > discard write-cached data and reminds them to replug the device --- and > one day, randomly, they lose their data because of some memory management > condition... It should not happen provided the total amount of dirty data for detachable devices is restricted to allow enough room for opening a dialog. That's no different, in principle, than the restrictions that are used to ensure some types of kernel memory allocation always succeed. There's no exact calculation, just a notion of "this many megabytes should be enough for a dialog". -- Jamie