Re: v9fs writepage

[Eric Van Hensbergen <ericvh@gmail.com>]

On 4/30/05, Al Viro <viro@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk> wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 30, 2005 at 01:47:35PM -0500, Eric Van Hensbergen wrote:
> > Yes. I agree.  I actually explicitly took all the cacheing behavior
> > out of v9fs when I started getting involved a year ago. 
> 
> Well, let me put it that way:
>         a) more complexity does not help to get new code merged.
>         b) 9P has very obvious RPC-style uses.  We have nothing really
> suitable in that area and implementation on non-caching 9P client has
> immediate applications.  And _that_ is far more interesting than ability
> to import from Plan 9 fileserver or u9fs running on a Unix box.
>         c) mmap() is and ever had been optional.  If userland code breaks
> due to mmap() not working for some file - it's already fs-dependent.
> 

It is easy enough to remove, mostly in one file except for asssigning
the address_space_operations in vfs_inode.  I'll take it out before
RC3 and provide it as a separate optional-patch for folks wishing to
use v9fs for root file systems and such (the original motivation
behind supporting mmap was LANL was using it for root file systems and
were running into trouble exec'ing things without mmap).

Sorry for making assumptions about what would/wouldn't be accept Viro
-- I should have talked to you about things sooner, but wanted to do
my best to clean up the existing code base and provide a level of
functionality that would satisfy what I thought Linux users'
expectations of a distributed file system.

RC3 already has a lot of cleanups in it (mostly from hch's comments
and running it through sparse).  I should be sending something out
sometime tomorrow or Monday morning at the latest.

Al - I'd really like your feedback on the driver as a whole once
you've had a chance to go over the new set of patches - I'm very happy
to make whatever changes are necessary to make it more
acceptable/useful to the linux community.

            -eric