Re: [PATCH 3/3] mlock: avoid dirtying pages and triggering writeback

Christoph Hellwig
2010-11-18T13:39:11Z

On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 05:43:06AM -0500, Theodore Tso wrote:
> Why is it at all important that mlock() force block allocation for sparse blocks? It's not at all specified in the mlock() API definition that it does that.
>
> Are there really programs that assume that mlock() == fallocate()?!?

If there are programs that do they can't predate linux 2.6.15, and only
work on btrfs/ext4/xfs/etc, but not ext2/ext3/reiserfs. Seems rather
unlikely to me.