Re: [patch 0/9] writeback data integrity and other fixes (take 3)

[Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 12:22:35PM +0000, Jamie Lokier wrote:
> Nick Piggin wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 05:44:17AM -0400, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > > On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 10:21:43AM +0100, Nick Piggin wrote:
> > > > Please do.
> > > 
> > > Well, there's one stumling block I haven't made progress on yet:
> > > 
> > > I've changed the prototype of ->fsync to lose the dentry as we should
> > > always have a valid file struct.  Except that nfsd doesn't on
> > > directories.  So I either need to fake up a file there, or bail out
> > > and add a ->dir_sync export operation that needs just a dentry.
> > 
> > OK. I don't know much about hthat code, but I would think nfsd
> > should look as close to the syscall layer as possible. I guess
> > there must be something prohibitive (some protocol semantics?).
> > 
> > Is there anything that particularly makes it a file operation
> > as opposed to an inode operation?
> 
> In principle, is fsync() required to flush all dirty data written
> through any file descriptor ever, or just dirty data written through
> the file descriptor used for fsync()?

fsync() is required to flush the data that is dirty at the time of the
call, as well as any associated metadata needed to reference that data. It
doesn't matter who wrote the data in the first place....

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com