6 comments

  • PeterWhittaker 2 hours ago
    The asynchronous behaviour raises interesting questions as to whether or not this is a bug or working as intended, and whether or not the io_uring API should offer controls to allow the calling application to decide.

    With synchronous intra-machine calls we mostly take it for granted that pending modifications die with the caller.

    But with inter-machine communications we mostly take it for granted that the sending machine and its entire local area can disappear and operations it sent will complete.

    Of course, there are exceptions, especially when APIs/systems offer atomicity, consistency checks, etc.

    But without express design intent, or preferably caller intent, one can argue both sides of the asynchronous intra-machine case and be right.

    I guess my thinking isn't so much that this happens as that it happens implicitly.

    • eivanov89 1 hour ago
      Thank you very much for a very nice annotation/summary and sharing your thoughts.
  • fooker 43 minutes ago
    If it's truly asynchronous, I don't see the issue with IO being decoupled from process lifetime.

    If you wanted to stop the IO at process death, the mechanism needed for this would introduce an overhead that would likely slow things down in general.

    • eivanov89 36 minutes ago
      Note, that this also includes retaining process memory related to the I/O. In my experiment I used regular 4 KiB pages, which is smaller or equal to the I/O block size. However, in case of huge pages only a small fraction can be I/O related. And I suppose, that this small part would pin the whole page, which might have some sensitive information. Still protected, however, but who knows.
  • blackoil 3 hours ago
    Is your process Hindu, Buddhist, Christian?
    • fooker 42 minutes ago
      A process is monotheistic because everyone is created by PID 1.
      • eivanov89 31 minutes ago
        But when process dies, might it hope to become init on next reboot?
  • pianom4n 4 hours ago
    The AI prose is painful.
    • collinstevens 2 hours ago
      you can just feel it in your bones

      > These are measured results backed by the Linux source, not a portable guarantee for every kernel, filesystem, device, or API called “AIO”.

      > The interesting race window is there, but hard to see. So I made it larger.

      • eivanov89 1 hour ago
        I'm the author and I'm not native speaker, so please bear that in mind. However, I admit I've used AI for grammar and style. IMHO, the post is not fiction, I just wanted to communicate the ideas as clearly and effectively as possible.
        • pianom4n 1 hour ago
          Just don't. Your older posts are perfectly fine and much preferable to the most recent two.
          • eivanov89 1 hour ago
            Frankly speaking, you are the second (with this thread, the third) one, who says that. So, it looks that I really should write myself again with just grammar checks, not the style.
            • magicalhippo 1 hour ago
              What I've done a few times is have the AI provide feedback, and then I rewrite myself based on the feedback. So I don't use what the AI suggests directly, just the essence if I agree.
              • throw-the-towel 2 minutes ago
                But critically, you don't apply every piece of feedback the AI offers because many are very silly. I'm also not a native speaker of English, and this is what I do.
              • eivanov89 58 minutes ago
                That's a good approach. My sin is that if I like the sentence, I keep and don't rewrite. Because if I see it is good, I don't feel I should. And probably I don't see that "prose" is bad each time it is indeed bad.
            • gib444 48 minutes ago
              It's easy to falsely assume readers expect you to be native, or that they are even native English speakers themselves

              Or that they want AI text over imperfect English

              • pianopatrick 36 minutes ago
                I wonder what would happen if you just told the AI to speak in broken english...

                Hilarity may ensure.

              • eivanov89 35 minutes ago
                Fair enough.
  • charcircuit 2 hours ago
    I feel like this is a Linux bug. Linux shouldn't cleanup a process until it has finished execution.
  • DeathIsWeird 9 minutes ago
    You mean the process doesn’t go to heaven?

    Unrelated: My cat died. Saddest day of my life. I watched the light leave his eyes and still wonder where he went.

    I looked it up and it said that the last thing to go when dying is probably your hearing.

    When you die, typically you lose your sight first, then your bodily sensations, and 1-by-1 all your sensory channels turn off: Balance, equilibrium, proprioception, until you are like an empty force flying through infinite darkness, all your thoughts still in tact, knowing what is happening to you, and in the background you can still hear everyone in the room, until the sounds too begin to fade and distort into a light buzzing noise that gets higher and higher pitched like a zipper zipping up your last waking experience in a metaphorical body bag to be tossed off the edge of time.