Re: [PATCH 0/6] jbd cleanup

From: Akinobu Mita
Date: Sat Sep 10 2005 - 09:56:44 EST


On Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 02:15:22AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Akinobu Mita <mita@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > The following 6 patches cleanup the jbd code and kill about 200 lines.
> >
>
> Thanks, but I'm not inclined to apply them.
>
> a) Maybe 70-80% of the Linux world uses this filesystem. We need to be
> very cautious in making changes to it.

And we need many eyeballs.
(I've tried to understand how the jbd works several times.
But I always failed.)

> b) A relatively large number of people are carrying quite large
> out-of-tree patches, some of which they're hoping to merge sometime.
> Admittedly more against ext3 than JBD, but there is potential here to
> cause those people trouble.
>
> Plus the switch to list_heads in journal_s has some impact on type safety
> and debuggability - I considered doing it years ago but decided not to
> because I found I _used_ those pointers fairly commonly in development.
> list_heads are a bit of a pain in gdb (kgdb and kernel core dumps), for
> example.

About the debuggability of list_heads, how about adding the kind of
the following gdb macros in .gdbinit?

---

define list_entry
set $ptr=$arg0
p ($arg1 *)((char *)$ptr - (size_t) &(($arg1 *)0)->$arg2)
end

define list_entry_s
set $ptr=$arg0
p (struct $arg1 *)((char *)$ptr - (size_t) &((struct $arg1 *)0)->$arg2)
end

define to_journal_head
list_entry_s $arg0 journal_head b_list
end

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