Re: [Ext2-devel] Re: Possible Idea with filesystem buffering.

Andrew Morton
2002-01-23T21:03:31Z

"Stephen C. Tweedie" wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> On Tue, Jan 22, 2002 at 05:03:02PM -0200, Rik van Riel wrote:
> > On Tue, 22 Jan 2002, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > Hans Reiser wrote:
> > >
> > > Note that writepage() doesn't get used much. Most VM-initiated
> > > filesystem writeback activity is via try_to_release_page(), which
> > > has somewhat more vague and flexible semantics.
> >
> > We may want to change this though, or at the very least get
> > rid of the horrible interplay between ->writepage and
> > try_to_release_page() ...
>
> This is actually really important --- writepage on its own cannot
> distinguish between requests to flush something to disk (eg. msync or
> fsync), and requests to evict dirty data from memory.
>
> This is really important for ext3's data journaling mode --- syncing
> to disk only requires flushing as far as the journal, but evicting
> dirty pages requires a full writeback too. That's one place where our
> traditional VM notion of writepage just isn't quite fine-grained
> enough.

And we use currently use PF_MEMALLOC to work out which context
we're being called from. Sigh.

I wish I'd taken better notes of all the square pegs which
ext3 had to push into the kernel's round holes. But there
were so many :)

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