Re: [PATCH] [PATCH] xfstests: use -F when making scratch ext4 fs

[Andreas Dilger <adilger@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 2013-04-26, at 1:18 PM, Eric Sandeen wrote:
> On 4/26/13 2:16 PM, Josef Bacik wrote:
>> mkfs.ext4 will ask you if you are sure if you try to mkfs an entire disk 
>> instead of just a partition, so any xfstest that uses a scratch device and 
>> you specify a full disk will appear to hang because it's waiting for you to 
>> say yes.  This fixes the problem by just forcing it to do its thing.  Thanks,
>> 
>> Signed-off-by: Josef Bacik <jbacik@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> 
> Reviewed-by: Eric Sandeen <sandeen@xxxxxxxxxx>
> 
> The whole-disk test is pretty derpy anyway. Too bad -F overrides
> much more than just that, but this is probably a decent
> thing to do.

Yeah, we've had to work around the whole-device check for years,
because the 512-byte sector offset for the DOS partition table
kills performance on RAID systems.

Given that the kernel should hold the whole block device busy these
days for O_EXCL opens if there are partitions on the device, it
should be safe to remove this check from mke2fs, though the above
workaround would still be needed for a while.

Cheers, Andreas