Re: [PATCH] pagecache lock ordering

Andrew Morton (akpm@zip.com.au)
Wed, 09 Jan 2002 16:52:38 -0800


Hugh Dickins wrote:
>
> There's two places, do_buffer_fdatasync

generic_buffer_fdatasync() and hence do_buffer_fdatasync()
are completely unused. It may be simpler to just trash
them.

> and __find_lock_page_helper,

Yeah. The code can't deadlock because:

page_cache_get();
spin_lock(&pagecache_lock);
page_cache_release();

we implicitly *know* that page_cache_release won't try
to acquire pagemap_lru_lock, because the page is in the
pagecache and has count=2 or more. Which is a bit, umm,
subtle.

I get the feeling that a lot of this would be cleaned up
if presence on an LRU contributed to page->count. It
seems strange, kludgy and probably racy that this is not
the case.

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