On Tue, Jan 04, 2011 at 08:52:31PM +1100, Nick Piggin wrote: > OK I missed that part about not requiring dirty metadata to be written, > just currently ongoing async operations. But then I don't understand how > it would be used by nfsd, how does nfsd start some async operation on > the inode metadata such that ->commit_metadata would do anything useful > for it? NFSD calls various inode operations (create/mkdir/mknod/link/symlink/ rename/unlink/rmdir/setattr) and then requires those operations to be on disk before completing the request to the client, but it does not require other dirty state to be written (data, unlogged size or timestamp updates). Take a look at the XFS implementation: it just checks if the inode is still pinned (that is in the in-memory log, but not commited to disk) and if so forces the log up to the log buffer that contains the last changes to the inode. -- 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