Linus,
I don't know why it was done this way, but it appears that unless buffer
heads are allocated from the buffer cache, submitting your own via
commit_write() doesn't seem to work. perhaps you could enlighten me as
to why buffers aren't getting flushed as they should. after stepping
though the code, it appears that external buffer heads cannot be used
with the page cache.
I've created an alternate implementation that works using my own LRU
(which is less than ieal), and have also "hacked" a 2.3.99pre-5 kernel
to expose the "static" functions from the buffer cache so I can obtain
buffer_heads from the Linux buffer cache and pass them to calls to
commit_write() -- this works great, except when I've got a lot of
mirrors on the system with multiple volumes this really sucks up ***A
LOT*** of memory as buffer heads.
The obvious and simple solution is to provide a VARIABLE SECTOR LENGTH
buffer head to ll_rw_block() without the onerous "block size
512-1024-2048-4096" restriction that requires TONS of memory to be
NEEDLESSLY sucked up and used for buffer head chains, when a simple
field (like b_size) is already present to tell the driver the block
size. I don't understand why it wasn't implemented this way in the
first place -- such would seem intuitive to me.
I don't know how ugly such a change would be, or how many drivers it
would bust, but it would certainly make it a lot easier moving forward
for all kinds of performance optimizations. At present, I've had to
implement an extra flush daemon to flush the dirty pages with mirroring
enabled. I would rather have a buffer head that will:
1). allow variable length sector writes/reads up to 128 sectors in a
run.
2). allow logical LBA (vs. physical) that will call bmap() prior to
write and support multiple locations for a single page to be written.
3). allow externally allocated buffer heads to be posted via
commit_write() and actually get flushed.
The semantic of having a dirty page that is flushed in a lazy manner was
a **GREAT** idea. I just wish it worked without the incestuous
dependencies with the buffer cache (or at a minimum, provide a way for
external consumers to post buffer heads that get written).
:-)
Jeff Merkey
TRG, Inc.
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon May 15 2000 - 21:00:19 EST