Hi Hugh, On Sat, 13 Oct 2007, Pekka Enberg wrote: > Doesn't msync(2) get to it via mm/page-writeback.c:write_cache_pages() > without unionfs even? On 10/14/07, Hugh Dickins <hugh@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I believe not. Please do double-check my assertions, I've always found > the _writepages paths rather twisty; but my belief (supported by the > fact that we've not hit shmem_writepage's BUG_ON(page_mapped(page)) > in five years) is that tmpfs/shmem opts out of all of that with its > .capabilities = BDI_CAP_NO_ACCT_DIRTY | BDI_CAP_NO_WRITEBACK, > in shmem_backing_dev_info, which avoids all those _writepages avenues > (e.g. through bdi_cap_writeback_dirty tests), and write_cache_pages is > just a subfunction of the _writepages. Thanks for the explanation, you're obviously correct. However, I don't think the mapping_cap_writeback_dirty() check in __filemap_fdatawrite_range() works as expected when tmpfs is a lower mount for an unionfs mount. There's no BDI_CAP_NO_WRITEBACK capability for unionfs mappings so do_fsync() will call write_cache_pages() that unconditionally invokes shmem_writepage() via unionfs_writepage(). Unless, of course, there's some other unionfs magic I am missing. Pekka - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html