On Thursday 11 August 2005 00:27, David Howells wrote: > What happens is this: > > (1) readpage() is issued against NFS (for example). > > (2) NFS consults the local cache, and finds the page isn't available > there. > > (3) NFS reads the page from the server. > > (4) NFS sets PG_fs_misc and tells the cache to store the page. > > (5) NFS sets PG_uptodate and unlocks the page. > > Some time later, the cache finishes writing the page to disk: > > (6) The cache calls NFS to say that it's finished writing the page. > > (7) NFS calls end_page_fs_misc() - which clears PG_fs_misc - to indicate > to any waiters that the page can now be written to. > > Now: any PTEs set up to point to this page start life read-only. If they're > part of a shared-writable mapping, then the MMU will generate a WP fault > when someone attempts to write to the page through that mapping: > > (a) do_wp_page() gets called. > > (b) do_wp_page() sees that the page's host has registered an interest in > knowing that the page is becoming writable: > > vm_operations_struct::page_mkwrite() > > (c) do_wp_page() calls out to the filesystem. > > (d) NFS sees the page is wanting to become writable and waits for the > PG_fs_misc flag to become cleared. > > (e) NFS returns to the caller and things proceed as normal. > > Doing this permits the cache state to be more predictable in the event of > power loss because we know that userspace won't have scribbled on this page > whilst the cache was trying to write it to disk.
Hi David, To be honest I'm having some trouble following this through logically. I'll read through a few more times and see if that fixes the problem. This seems cluster-related, so I have an interest. Who is using this interface? Regards, Daniel - 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/