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When journalling data we currently just walk over pages, journal those
that are marked for delayed dirtying (only pinned pages dirtied behing
our back these days) and checkpoint other dirty pages. Because some
pages may be part of running transaction the result is that after
filemap_write_and_wait() we are not guaranteed pages are stable on disk.
Thus places that want to flush current pagecache content need to jump
through hoops to make sure journalled data is not lost. This is
manageable in cases completely controlled by ext4 (such as extent
shifting operations or inode eviction) but it gets ugly for stuff like
fsverity. Furthermore it is rather error prone as people often do not
realize journalled data needs special handling.

So change ext4_writepages() to commit transaction with inode's data
before going through the writeback loop in WB_SYNC_ALL mode. As a result
filemap_write_and_wait() is now really getting pages to stable storage
and makes pagecache pages safe to reclaim. Consequently we can remove
the special handling of journalled data from several places in follow up
patches.

Note that this will make fsync(2) for journalled data more expensive as
we will end up not only committing the transaction we need but also
checkpointing the data (which we may have previously skipped if the data
was part of the running transaction). If we really cared, we would need
to introduce special VFS function for writing out & invalidating page
cache for a range, use ->launder_page callback to perform checkpointing,
and use it from all the places that need this functionality. But at this
point I'm not convinced the complexity is worth it.
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20230329154950.19720-5-jack@suse.cz

Signed-off-by: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>