From: Theodore Ts'o Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/2] new API to allocate buffer-cache for superblock in non-movable area Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2014 04:14:40 -0400 Message-ID: <20140722081440.GA5137@thunk.org> References: <53CDF437.4090306@lge.com> <20140722073005.GT3935@laptop> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: Gioh Kim , Alexander Viro , Andrew Morton , "Paul E. McKenney" , Jan Kara , linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Andreas Dilger , linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org To: Peter Zijlstra Return-path: Received: from imap.thunk.org ([74.207.234.97]:49178 "EHLO imap.thunk.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753350AbaGVIOz (ORCPT ); Tue, 22 Jul 2014 04:14:55 -0400 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20140722073005.GT3935@laptop> Sender: linux-ext4-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 09:30:05AM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote: > > I introduce a new API for allocating page from non-movable area. > > It is useful for ext4 and others that want to hold page cache for a long time. > > There's no word on why you can't teach ext4 to still migrate that page. > For all I know it might be impossible, but at least mention why. In theory we might be able to do it, but it's only a single 4k page, and we'd have to add RCU locking all over the place in order to be able to switch out the superblock structure, since we reference it all over the place inside fs/ext4. The question I'd ask is is it worth it. I suspect the bigger deal is that there are all sorts of inodes and dentries which are effectively pinned and thus, impossible to migrate. This probably locks down many more pages (by a fact of at least 10 or 20), and I'd think that's something you would be much more interested in fixing. - Ted