Re: [PATCH v2] fadvise: introduce POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED_FS

From: Matthew Wilcox
Date: Wed Apr 27 2011 - 14:48:06 EST


On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 02:39:53PM -0400, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > Mmm ... what if I open /dev/sdxyz and call fadvise() on it? ??I think
> > you end up flushing /dev's page cache entries, instead of the filesystem
> > which is on /dev/sdxyz.
>
> i was thinking of that, but was trying to come up with situations
> where there might not have a node to work on. fs's in a file go
> through loop devs, dm/lvm have ones created, and flash fs's still have
> a mtd block. how about network based fs's ? how you going to signal
> dropping of pages for nfs or cifs or fuse ones ?

For a regular file, mapping->host->i_sb points to the superblock this
file is on. For a device, mapping->host->i_sb points to the superblock
corresponding to this device. So it's always what we want.

(hm, what about block devices not currently mounted? do we need to check
whether mapping->host is NULL?)

--
Matthew Wilcox Intel Open Source Technology Centre
"Bill, look, we understand that you're interested in selling us this
operating system, but compare it to ours. We can't possibly take such
a retrograde step."
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