Re: Linux 2.4.10-pre11

[Alexander Viro]

On Thu, 20 Sep 2001, Chris Mason wrote:

> > <nod>  And if you add Andrea's (perfectly valid) observation re having no
> > need to sync any fs structures we might have for that device, you get
> > __block_fsync().  After that it's easy to merge blkdev_close() code into
> > blkdev_put().
> > 
> >
> 
> Ok, __block_fsync is much better than just fsync_dev.
> 
> Are there other parts of blkdev_close you want merged into 
> blkdev_put? Without changing the reread blocks on last close 
> semantics, I think this is all we can do.
> 
> As far as I can tell, bdev->bd_inode is valid to send 
> to __block_fsync, am I missing something?

Eventually that will be the right thing, but only after we allocate
bd_inode upon blkdev_get()/blkdev_open() instead of trying to cannibalize
the inode passed to blkdev_open().

I'm testing that chunk right now (it also kills all the fake_inode crap in
block_dev.c).

When we cut the lifetime of block_device down we'll be able to get it
even simpler - allocate and free ->bd_inode at the same time as block_device,
but that's several chunks later.