Re: [00/17] Large Blocksize Support V3

David Chinner
2007-04-26T14:33:32Z

On Thu, Apr 26, 2007 at 04:53:00PM +0300, Avi Kivity wrote:
> David Chinner wrote:
> >The problem with this approach is that it turns around the whole
> >way we look at bufferheads. Right now we have well defined 1:n
> >mapping of page to bufferheads and so we tpyically lock the
> >page first them iterate all the bufferheads on the page.
> >
> >Going the other way, we need to support m:n which we means
> >the buffer has to become the primary interface for the filesystem
> >to the page cache. i.e. we need to lock the bufferhead first, then
> >iterate all the pages on it. This is messy because the cache indexes
> >via pages, not bufferheads. hence a buffer needs to point to all the
> >pages in it explicitly, and this leads to interesting issues with
> >locking.
> >
>
> Why is it necessary to assume that one filesystem block == one buffer?
> Is it for atomicity, efficiency, or something else?

By definition, really - each filesystem block has it's own state and
it's own disk mapping and so we need something to carry that
information around....

Cheers,

Dave.
--
Dave Chinner
Principal Engineer
SGI Australian Software Group