Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Mon, 7 May 2001 23:37:16 -0300 (BRT) | From | Marcelo Tosatti <> | Subject | Re: page_launder() bug |
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On Mon, 7 May 2001, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> In fact, it might even clean stuff up. Who knows? At least > page_launder() would not need to know about magic dead swap pages, because > the decision would be entirely in writepage(). > > And there aren't that many writepage() implementations in the kernel to > fix up (and the fixup tends to be two simple added lines of code for most > of them - just the "if (!priority) return"). > > Also note how some filesystems might use the writepage() callback even > with a zero priority as a hint that things are approaching the point where > we need to start flushing, which might make a difference for deciding when > to try to write a log entry, for example.
Moreover, the filesystem may want to return "-1" even if "priority" is non-zero --- think about delayed allocations. (the XFS guys were just complaining about page_launder() not checking the return value of writepage() so they could not do this kind of thing with delayed allocations sometime ago).
> Now, I'm not saying this is _the_ solution to it, but I don't see any > really clean alternatives.
I like it --- it pushes down control to the pagers so they can be smarter.
Will send a patch later.
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