Cc: Pekka J Enberg <penberg@...>, Ryan Finnie <ryan@...>, Andrew Morton <akpm@...>, <linux-kernel@...>, <linux-fsdevel@...>, <cjwatson@...>, <linux-mm@...>
...
I don't disagree with your unionfs_writepages patch, Pekka, but I think
it should be viewed as an optimization (don't waste time trying to write
a group of pages when we know that nothing will be done) rather than as
essential.
Prior to unionfs's own use of AOP_WRITEPAGE_ACTIVATE, there have only
been ramdisk and shmem generating it. ramdisk is careful only to
return it in the wbc->for_reclaim case: I think (as in the patch
I sent out before) shmem now ought to do so too for safety.
Back in 2.4 days it was reasonable to assume that ->writepage would
only get called from certain places, but things move faster nowadays,
and the unionfs example shows others are liable to start ab/using it.
I'll send Andrew that patch tomorrow (it's simple enough, but I'd
like at least to try to reproduce the page_mapped bug first).
Can it now? Current git has a patch from Andrew which bears a striking
resemblance to that from Pekka, stopping the leak from write_cache_pages.
Hugh
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