• Christoph Hellwig's avatar
    block: propagate BLKROSET on the whole device to all partitions · 947139bf
    Christoph Hellwig authored
    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:
    
      # blockdev --setro /dev/sda
      # echo foo > /dev/sda1
    
    permits writes. But:
    
      # blockdev --setro /dev/sda
      <something triggers revalidate>
      # echo foo > /dev/sda1
    
    doesn't.
    
    And a subsequent:
    
      # blockdev --setrw /dev/sda
      # echo foo > /dev/sda1
    
    doesn't work either since sda1's read-only policy has been inherited
    from the whole-disk device.
    
    You need to do:
    
      # blockdev --rereadpt
    
    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: default avatarMartin K. Petersen <martin.petersen@oracle.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarChristoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarMartin K. Petersen <martin.petersen@oracle.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarHannes Reinecke <hare@suse.de>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
    947139bf
genhd.c 53.1 KB