On Fri, Apr 04, 2014 at 11:15:07PM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote: > Hang on a second. What are you assuming the block size to be in this > example? If the block size is 4k, then this doesn't make any sense, > because unmapped memory will be in units of the block size, so we > couldn't have the second 512 byte segment be unmapped. Blocks are > unmaped, not individual 512 byte sectors. char *p = (char *)mmap(NULL, 8192, PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE, MAP_ANON, -1, 0); struct iovec v[8]; memset(p, 'a', 4096); munmap(p + 4096, 4096); for (int i = 0; i < 8; i++) v[i] = (struct iovec){p + i * 512, 512}; v[1].iov_base = p + 4096; /* unmapped */ The rest of feeding v to aio (with AIO_PWRITEV) is left as an exercise. v[0] points to 512 bytes of RAM, all present (and filled with 'a'). v[1] points to the memory we'd just munmapped; trying to dereference it would segfault, passing it to write() would give -EFAULT and passing the entire array to writev(2) will result in short write - 512 bytes (all 'a') written to file, return value is 512. Unmapped memory is in 4K units, all right - and iovec elements are free to point whereever they bloody please. Sure, v[0].iov_base is 4K-aligned and v[0].iov_len is 512, but that doesn't mean that v[1].iov_base can't point into completely different page. It does *not* have to be v[0].iov_base + 512. That's the whole point of iovec, after all - ability to take an arbitrary bunch of memory objects and write them all in one syscall, without having to copy them into adjacent addresses... -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html