[PATCH] md/bitmap: change md/bitmap file handling to use bmap to file blocks
If md is asked to store a bitmap in a file, it tries to hold onto the page cache pages for that file, manipulate them directly, and call a cocktail of operations to write the file out. I don't believe this is a supportable approach. This patch changes the approach to use the same approach as swap files. i.e. bmap is used to enumerate all the block address of parts of the file and we write directly to those blocks of the device. swapfile only uses parts of the file that provide a full pages at contiguous addresses. We don't have that luxury so we have to cope with pages that are non-contiguous in storage. To handle this we attach buffers to each page, and store the addresses in those buffers. With this approach the pagecache may contain data which is inconsistent with what is on disk. To alleviate the problems this can cause, md invalidates the pagecache when releasing the file. If the file is to be examined while the array is active (a non-critical but occasionally useful function), O_DIRECT io must be used. And new version of mdadm will have support for this. This approach simplifies a lot of code: - we no longer need to keep a list of pages which we need to wait for, as the b_endio function can keep track of how many outstanding writes there are. This saves a mempool. - -EAGAIN returns from write_page are no longer possible (not sure if they ever were actually). Signed-off-by: Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
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