From: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Date: Tue, 04 Apr 2006 18:21:23 GMT
Subject: Re: Solaris cloning woes partly diagnosed
Message-ID: <4432B923.7040202@zytor.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0604021118210.3050@g5.osdl.org>

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> One thing to do might be to make the itimer use a much higher frequency, 
> to trigger the problem more easily.
> 
> We do, for example, expect that regular file writing not do that. At least 
> "write_sha1_from_fd()" will just do a "write()" without testing the error 
> return, which is bad (it would silently create a truncated object if the 
> /tmp filesystem filled up). If somebody has their filesystem over NFS 
> mounted interruptible, partial writes could also happen.
> 

There seems to be a whole bunch of places where we use naked write()s 
where xwrite or fwrite would be a lot more appropriate.  The ssh-* files 
seem to be particularly offensive in that way.

There are also a number of places which call xwrite with the apparent 
belief that returning short is an error (e.g. blame.c).  This as far as 
I know the more common definition of xwrite(), but is *not* the one used 
in git -- the one in git only guarantees that at least one character is 
written.

	-hpa