Re: [PATCH v2] Do a proper locking for mmap and block size change

Mikulas Patocka
2012-11-29T18:23:55Z

On Thu, 29 Nov 2012, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 2:01 PM, Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> > This sounds sensible. I'm sending this patch.
>
> This looks much better.
>
> I think I'll apply this for 3.7 (since it's too late to do anything
> fancier), and then for 3.8 I will rip out all the locking entirely,
> because looking at the fs/buffer.c patch I wrote up, it's all totally
> unnecessary.
>
> Adding a ACCESS_ONCE() to the read of the i_blkbits value (when
> creating new buffers) simply makes the whole locking thing pointless.
> Just make the page lock protect the block size, and make it per-page,
> and we're done.
>
> No RCU grace period crap, no expedited mess, no nothing.
>
> Linus

Yes.

If you remove that percpu rw lock, you also need to rewrite direct i/o
code.

In theory, block device direct i/o doesn't need buffer block size at all.
But in practice, it shares a lot of code with filesystem direct i/o, it
reads the block size multiple times and it crashes if it changes.

Mikulas