Re: [PATCH] nfs: fix nfs_writepage()

From: Peter Zijlstra
Date: Wed Oct 17 2007 - 11:57:51 EST


On Wed, 2007-10-17 at 11:47 -0400, Trond Myklebust wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-10-17 at 11:45 -0400, Trond Myklebust wrote:
> > On Wed, 2007-10-17 at 17:30 +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> >
> > > The thing is, swapper_space just calls ->writepage() and expects the
> > > page to be written out. So either the a_ops usage of swapper_space is
> > > deviant or NFS' is.
> >
> > Could somebody please document WTF writepage() is supposed to do, and
> > WTF page_mkwrite() is for?
> >
> > I thought that page_mkwrite() was supposed to finally allow us to deal
> > with dirty pages in a clean manner: the caller gets to tell the
> > filesystem that it wants the entire page written out, and then dirties
> > the page. What is the point if the VM then expects to be able to
> > circumvent this?
>
> Put differently:
> * _who_ is dirtying the page when the swapper is trying to write
> the page out?
> * why are they not calling either page_mkwrite() or
> commit_write()?

I'm writing anonymous pages (I'm the crazy person doing swap over NFS).
And anonymous is dirty by default.

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