[ adding Xen ] On Thu, Aug 24, 2017 at 9:11 AM, Christoph Hellwig <hch@xxxxxx> wrote: > I still can't make any sense of this description. What is an external > agent? Userspace obviously can't ever see a change in the extent > map, so it can't be meant. External agent is a DMA device, or a hypervisor like Xen. In the DMA case perhaps we can use the fcntl lease mechanism, I'll investigate. In the Xen case it actually would need to use fiemap() to discover the physical addresses that back the file to setup their M2P tables. Here's the discussion where we discovered that physical address dependency: https://lists.xen.org/archives/html/xen-devel/2017-04/msg00419.html > It would help a lot if you could come up with a concrete user for this, > including example code. Will do. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-api" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html