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From: Daniel Phillips <phillips@innominate.de>
To: Rik van Riel <riel@conectiva.com.br>
Subject: Re: innd mmap bug in 2.4.0-test12
Date: Thu, 28 Dec 2000 16:15:48 +0100
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Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
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On Thu, 28 Dec 2000, Rik van Riel wrote:
> On Thu, 28 Dec 2000, Daniel Phillips wrote:
> 
> > It's logical that PageDirty should never be get for ramfs,
> 
> No. Not setting PageDirty will cause the system to move the
> page to the inactive_clean list and happily reclaim your data.
> 
> We _have to_ use something like PageDirty for this, and
> checking for the ->writepage method will even allow us to
> do stuff like dynamically switching swapping support for
> ramfs on/off (or other funny things).

You're suggesting using the absence of a method as a kind of flag, but
the code is really too full of obscure stuff like that already.

How about taking an extra user on the ramfs pages instead.  It doesn't
sound right to set PageDirty when you are not requesting IO.

-- 
Daniel
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