[dm-devel] [PATCH] dm-verity: Add error handling modes for corrupted blocks

[Vivek Goyal]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 04:06:49PM +0000, Sami Tolvanen wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 11:27:49AM -0400, Vivek Goyal wrote:
> > What's the idea behind kernel restart mode ? If a corrupted block is in
> > the path of boot, will we not get into a continuous reboot cycle.
> 
> It depends on how dm-verity is used. If we have PSTORE_CONSOLE enabled, for
> example, after a restart we can check if the restart was caused by dm-verity
> and then use a different mode when setting up the verity device. Most likely
> for some systems this is not a reasonable recovery method, but we find it to
> be useful on Android at least.

Ok.

Without knowing too much of detail, asking kernel to restart because one
block was corrupt sounds little drastic. If you are sending user space
events, why not let user space initiate the start and manage policy in
user space.

Thanks
Vivek