Re: reiserfs being part of the kernel: it's not just the code

Stephen C. Tweedie
2000-06-07T11:00:30Z

Hi,

On Tue, Jun 06, 2000 at 07:00:40PM -0700, Hans Reiser wrote:
>
> Do I miss a finepoint, or can this reservation API be as simple as using an
> agreed on counter for total system pinned pages which is constrained to some
> percentage of memory? I think we all discussed all of this last year, and the
> workshop Riel tried to organize sadly never happened.

It's a good bit more complex than that. We need not only that reservation
layer, but also a new notification mechanism to invoke early commit if
we exhaust the reservation limit, and a way of interacting with dirty
pages (which are not yet part of any transaction, but which may not be
flushable to disk without a new transaction being incurred). The dirty
mmaped data case is particularly nasty: we have very little VM
infrastructure right now which is suitable for fixing that.

> Perhaps we should do a
> workshop July 5 at the Libre Software conference in France? Probably this issue
> will already be solved by then, but there are plenty of other discussions to
> have in the vicinity of this problem.

Who will be at Usenix in San Diego in a couple of weeks' time? There
will certainly be some of the XFS and GFS people there, and I'll be
around all week.

Cheers,
Stephen