Re: [patch 3/4] fs: introduce inode dirty state helpers

[Nick Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 12:25 AM, Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 12:07:33AM +1100, Nick Piggin wrote:
>> Inode dirty state cannot be securely tested without participating properly
>> in the inode writeback protocol. Some filesystems need to check this state,
>> so break out the code into helpers and make them available.
>>
>> This could also be used to reduce strange interactions between background
>> writeback and fsync. Currently if we fsync a single page in a file, the
>> entire file gets requeued to the back of the background IO list, even if
>> it is due for writeout and has a large number of pages. That's left for
>> a later time.
>
> If you want filesystems to use the helpers they need to be exported,
> and good kerneldoc comments so that filesystem writers know what they
> need to do.

You're right, of course. I sent a half-baked patch there sorry. (Well, it should
be working quite well, but it needs exports and decent kerneldoc as you say).

Will send an update tomorrow.