On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 01:06:13AM +1100, npiggin@xxxxxxxxx wrote: > Inode dirty state cannot be securely tested without participating properly > in the inode writeback protocol. Some filesystems need to check this state, > so break out the code into helpers and make them available. > > This could also be used to reduce strange interactions between background > writeback and fsync. Currently if we fsync a single page in a file, the > entire file gets requeued to the back of the background IO list, even if > it is due for writeout and has a large number of pages. That's left for > a later time. Generally looks fine, but as Dave already mentioned I'd rather keep i_state manipulation outside the filesystems. This could be done with two wrappers like the following, which should also keep the churn inside fsync implementations downs: int fsync_begin(struct inode *inode, int datasync) { int ret = 0; unsigned mask = I_DIRTY_DATASYNC; if (!datasync) mask |= I_DIRTY_SYNC; spin_lock(&inode_lock); if (!inode_writeback_begin(inode, 1)) goto out; if (!(inode->i_state & mask)) goto out; inode->i_state &= ~(I_DIRTY_SYNC | I_DIRTY_DATASYNC); ret = 1; out: spin_unlock(&inode_lock); return ret; } static void fsync_end(struct inode *inode, int fail) { spin_lock(&inode_lock); if (fail) inode->i_state |= I_DIRTY_SYNC | I_DIRTY_DATASYNC; inode_writeback_end(inode); spin_unlock(&inode_lock); } note that this one marks the inode fully dirty in case of a failure, which is a bit overkill but keeps the interface simpler. Given that failure is fsync is catastrophic anyway (filesystem corruption, etc) that seems fine to me. Alternatively we could add a fsync_helper that gets a function pointer with the ->write_inode signature and contains the above code before and after it. generic_file_fsync would pass the real ->write_inode while other filesystems could pass specific routines. -- 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