Nick Piggin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Tuesday 16 October 2007 08:40, Eric W. Biederman wrote: >> The problem: When we are trying to free buffers try_to_free_buffers() >> will look at ramdisk pages with clean buffer heads and remove the >> dirty bit from the page. Resulting in ramdisk pages with data that get >> removed from the page cache. Ouch! >> >> Buffer heads appear on ramdisk pages when a filesystem calls >> __getblk() which through a series of function calls eventually calls >> init_page_buffers(). >> >> So to fix the mismatch between buffer head and page state this patch >> modifies init_page_buffers() to transfer the dirty bit from the page to >> the buffer heads like we currently do for the uptodate bit. >> >> This patch is safe as only __getblk calls init_page_buffers, and >> there are only two implementations of block devices cached in the >> page cache. The generic implementation in block_dev.c and the >> implementation in rd.c. >> >> The generic implementation of block devices always does everything >> in terms of buffer heads so it always has buffer heads allocated >> before a page is marked dirty so this change does not affect it. > > This is probably a good idea. Was this causing the reiserfs problems? > If so, I think we should be concentrating on what the real problem > is with reiserfs... (or at least why this so obviously correct > looking patch is wrong).
I think it was my cleanup patch that was sitting on top of this, That caused the problems. Eric - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
