On Fri, 15 Dec 2000, Stephen C. Tweedie wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Fri, Dec 15, 2000 at 02:00:19AM -0500, Alexander Viro wrote:
> > On Thu, 14 Dec 2000, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> >
> > Just one: any fs that really cares about completion callback is very likely
> > to be picky about the requests ordering. So sync_buffers() is very unlikely
> > to be useful anyway.
> >
> > In that sense we really don't have anonymous buffers here. I seriously
> > suspect that "unrealistic" assumption is not unrealistic at all. I'm
> > not sufficiently familiar with XFS code to say for sure, but...
>
> Right. ext3 and reiserfs just want to submit their own IOs when it
> comes to the journal. (At least in ext3, already-journaled buffers
> can be written back by the VM freely.) It's a matter of telling the
> fs when that should start.
>
> > What we really need is a way for VFS/VM to pass the pressure on filesystem.
> > That's it. If fs wants unusual completions for requests - let it have its
> > own queueing mechanism and submit these requests when it finds that convenient.
>
> There is a very clean way of doing this with address spaces. It's
> something I would like to see done properly for 2.5: eliminate all
> knowledge of buffer_heads from the VM layer. It would be pretty
> simple to remove page->buffers completely and replace it with a
> page->private pointer, owned by whatever address_space controlled the
> page. Instead of trying to unmap and flush buffers on the page
> directly, these operations would become address_space operations.
>
> We could still provide the standard try_to_free_buffers() and
> unmap_underlying_metadata() functions to operate on the per-page
> buffer_head lists, and existing filesystems would only have to point
> their address_space "private metadata" operations at the generic
> functions. However, a filesystem which had additional ordering
> constraints could then intercept the flush or writeback calls from the
> VM and decide on its own how best to honour the VM pressure.
Stephen,
The ->flush() operation (which we've been discussing a bit) would be very
useful now (mainly for XFS).
At page_launder(), we can call ->flush() if the given page has it defined.
Otherwise use try_to_free_buffers() as we do now for filesystems which
dont care about the special flushing treatment.
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