> This is by far the right way to go if it weren't for one can of worms:
> aliasing. If an indirect block were accessed via the device's inode (say
> it's a 1024 byte block) and is immediately followed by a block of some
> file's data, writing to the indirect block would cause the dirty 'page'
> to be flushed, overwriting any update made to the file.
No, the page cache is always virtually addressed, so the physical location
on disk is irrelevant (anybody who tries to use the page cache as a
physical page will get stomped upon by the kernel anyway).
Linus,
I believe the problem Benjamin was referring to is the issue of
differences in the filesystem blocksize versus page size, given that the
page cache does reads and writes in page size chunks, which might not
be appropriate for the metadata case.
- Ted