Re: adventures in booting

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Thu, Dec 02, 2004 at 04:59:49PM -0500, Colin Walters wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-12-02 at 16:38 -0500, Daniel Veillard wrote:
> 
> >   If the kernel has an atomic rename system call then it can be done
> > without race, if not that will be a very serious issue.
> 
> It has an atomic rename for files; but you can't atomically change a
> directory that has content.  Or am I missing something?  Not to mention
> this would break things like RPM verification.

  I think you're missing something. It is possible to copy the file
somewhere else and then rename it to the original name, then update
the m_time and rpm -Va should not say anything, the checksum and file
system attributes should look alike.
  The copy to a single new directory is a trick to force allocation
in the same filesystem zone (if the FS has zones).

Daniel

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