Re: Delayed allocation and page_lock vs transaction start ordering

Aneesh Kumar K.V
2008-05-27T15:12:02Z

On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 02:43:12PM +0200, Jan Kara wrote:
> On Mon 26-05-08 23:30:43, Aneesh Kumar K.V wrote:
>
> > I have got another question now related to page_mkwrite. AFAIU writepage
> > writeout dirty buffer_heads. It also looks at whether the pages are
> > dirty or not. In the page_mkwrite callback both are not true. ie we call
> > set_page_dirty from do_wp_page after calling page_mkwrite. I haven't
> > verified whether the above is correct or not. Just thinking reading the
> > code.
> Writepage call itself doesn't look at whether the page is dirty or not -
> that flag is already cleared when writepage is called. You are right that
> the page is marked dirty only after page_mkwrite is called - the meaning of
> page_mkwrite() call is roughly "someone wants to do the first write to this
> page via mmap, prepare filesystem for that". But we don't really care
> whether the page is dirty or not - we know it carries correct data (it is
> uptodate) and so we can write it if we want (and need).
>

I am looking at __block_write_full_page and we have

if (!buffer_mapped(bh) && buffer_dirty(bh)) {
WARN_ON(bh->b_size != blocksize);
err = get_block(inode, block, bh, 1);
if (err)

ie, we do get_block only if the buffer_head is dirty. So I am bit
doubtful whether we are actually allocating blocks via page_mkwrite.

-aneesh