Delete symlinks before removing devices

[DemiMarie]

Before destroying a device-mapper device, devicemapper-rs should delete the symlink for that device under /dev/mapper. This avoids race conditions by ensuring that opening /dev/mapper/somedevice always returns the correct device if it succeeds.

[jbaublitz]

Hi @DemiMarie! Symlinks are all managed by udev so our libraries removing the links does not really solve the problem. Can you tell me a little bit more about the specific problem you're bumping into so we can see if we can provide some other suggestions? Is there something happening where the symlink is taking a long time to be removed?

[DemiMarie]

Hi @DemiMarie! Symlinks are all managed by udev so our libraries removing the links does not really solve the problem. Can you tell me a little bit more about the specific problem you're bumping into so we can see if we can provide some other suggestions? Is there something happening where the symlink is taking a long time to be removed?

The advantage of managing the links manually is that it avoids race conditions, by ensuring that /dev/mapper/something is deleted before the device node it points to is destroyed and potentially reused for something else. udev cannot make that guarantee.