Re: [patch] vmfixes-2.4.0-test9-B2

Alexander Viro
2000-09-25T06:17:14Z

On Sun, 24 Sep 2000, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> I'm not claiming that the buffer cache accesses would go away - I'm just
> saying that the unbalanced "only buffer cache" case should go away,
> because things like "find" and friends will still cause mostly page cache
> activity.
>
> (Considering the size of the inode on ext2, I don't know how true this is,
> I have to admit. It might still be quite biased towards the buffer cache,
> and as such the additional page cache pressure might not be enough to
> really cause any major shift in balancing).

Hrrrmmm... You know, since we don't have to associate struct inode with every
address space and inode table _is_ a linear array, after all... We
might put it into pagecache too. Very few places access the on-disk
inode, so it's not too horrible. All we need is readpage() and that's
very easy, considering the fact that allocation is static. prepare_write()
and commit_write() may be NULL for all I care and writepage() will
be easy too - no holes, no allocation, no nothing. Looks like we need to deal
with ext2_update_inode(), ext2_read_inode() and that's it. Even less
intrusive than directory stuff...

Comments?