> 3) Revert readpage() and writepage() to using inodes.
>
> My belief is that readpage and writepage should take the inode as an
> argument, as the mm model implicitely assumes that an inode is the single
> instance of the backing store for a file. A target design for the vfs
> should be decided on, and the code then made to conform to that. Some
> ideas: any operation having to do with a particular instance of a file
> should be a dentry operation. This includes things like open, stat,
> readlink... almost all current inode operations. This leaves only a few
> low-level operations for inodes, which shouldn't have anything to do with
> dentries. If people agree to this sort of design (they did earlier), I'll
> redo the patch I did (was for .52, but it wasn't finished until major
> dentry changes completely broke it). Note that there's major hell with
> procfs if the ability for a proc inode to have its own inode operations is
> desired. But that ability *could* be completely ignored.
The changes to pass a dentry argument to readpage and writepage was made
so that filesystems that need a path to implement low-level operations
will have it. The dentry argument in all cases carries the same inode
that would have been passed in the older calls.
The specific fix that motivated the changes was that we need to allow
for separate NFS filehandles for each path leading to an inode, rather
than storing just one path in the inode.
Regards,
Bill