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* Question about dirty data for unlinked files
@ 2017-03-23 20:07 Raymond Jennings
  2017-03-29 11:23 ` Jan Kara
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 2+ messages in thread
From: Raymond Jennings @ 2017-03-23 20:07 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: linux-ext4

If you delete a file (and don't have it open), and there's a bunch of
dirty data for that file still in page cache, does all that dirty data
disappear or does it still get written back?

I'm curious for performance reasons because I have an experimental
process I'm developing, and it has a habit of leaving large amounts of
dirty data in a huge output file.  I'd like to be able to unlink the
file and skip the writeback process once the file's been unlinked.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 2+ messages in thread

* Re: Question about dirty data for unlinked files
  2017-03-23 20:07 Question about dirty data for unlinked files Raymond Jennings
@ 2017-03-29 11:23 ` Jan Kara
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 2+ messages in thread
From: Jan Kara @ 2017-03-29 11:23 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Raymond Jennings; +Cc: linux-ext4

On Thu 23-03-17 13:07:23, Raymond Jennings wrote:
> If you delete a file (and don't have it open), and there's a bunch of
> dirty data for that file still in page cache, does all that dirty data
> disappear or does it still get written back?

The dirty data just gets discarded when the inode is deleted. In fact if
the file fits in memory (and in dirty_limit), none of the data need to make
it to disk.

								Honza

-- 
Jan Kara <jack@suse.com>
SUSE Labs, CR

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 2+ messages in thread

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