Comment author: administrator

Hi Georges,

Problems:
On Solaris, writing on a raw device beyond its capacity hangs the process.
Internal Reason:

1. Writing on a raw device beyond its capacity returns 0 (with no error) on
   Solaris.

This is unfortunate, because it doesn't conform with the Single Unix
Specification (Unix98): write() should either return a number > 0
if some bytes were written, or the ENOSPC error otherwise. This said,
raw disk partitions aren't explicitly covered by the spec, so...

The easiest fix would be to suppress the loop, although it might
possibly break some existing code relying on the "atomicity" of the
write (Is such a code exist? this is not provided by Unix...).

The main problem is that Unix.write is declared as returning "unit"
rather than "int", so the application wouldn't be informed of a short
write. The reason for this and for the loop was to simplify the
application, which doesn't have to check for short writes. On the
other hand, it's questionable, since when the application
gets an ENOSPC error, it doesn't know whether some bytes have been
written or not.

Thanks for the bug report. I don't promise to fix it immediately, but
I'll keep it in mind.

• Xavier Leroy

Comment author: administrator

Solaris bug (at least w.r.t. the Single Unix Specification). Still, the type of
Unix.write is questionable.