From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2007 02:16:24 -0700 From: Andrew Morton Subject: Re: [PATCH resend] ramdisk: fix zeroed ramdisk pages on memory pressure Message-Id: <20071015021624.7d5233bd.akpm@linux-foundation.org> In-Reply-To: <200710160006.19735.nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> References: <200710151028.34407.borntraeger@de.ibm.com> <200710160006.19735.nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Nick Piggin Cc: Christian Borntraeger , linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Martin Schwidefsky , Theodore Ts'o List-ID: On Tue, 16 Oct 2007 00:06:19 +1000 Nick Piggin wrote: > On Monday 15 October 2007 18:28, Christian Borntraeger wrote: > > Andrew, this is a resend of a bugfix patch. Ramdisk seems a bit > > unmaintained, so decided to sent the patch to you :-). > > I have CCed Ted, who did work on the code in the 90s. I found no current > > email address of Chad Page. > > This really needs to be fixed... rd.c is fairly mind-boggling vfs abuse. > I can't make up my mind between the approaches to fixing it. > > On one hand, I would actually prefer to really mark the buffers > dirty (as in: Eric's fix for this problem[*]) than this patch, > and this seems a bit like a bandaid... > > On the other hand, the wound being covered by the bandaid is > actually the code in the buffer layer that does this latent > "cleaning" of the page because it sadly doesn't really keep > track of the pagecache state. But it *still* feels like we > should be marking the rd page's buffers dirty which should > avoid this problem anyway. > > [*] However, hmm, with Eric's patch I guess we'd still have a hole > where filesystems that write their buffers by hand think they are > "cleaning" these things and we're back to square one. That could > be fixed by marking the buffers dirty again? > > Why were Eric's patches dropped, BTW? I don't remember. runtime problems, iirc. -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: email@kvack.org