Re: [PATCH v2] fadvise: introduce POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED_FS

On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 14:47, Matthew Wilcox wrote:

On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 02:39:53PM -0400, Mike Frysinger wrote:

quoted

quoted

Mmm ... what if I open /dev/sdxyz and call fadvise() on it? ??I think
you end up flushing /dev's page cache entries, instead of the filesystem
which is on /dev/sdxyz.

i was thinking of that, but was trying to come up with situations
where there might not have a node to work on.  fs's in a file go
through loop devs, dm/lvm have ones created, and flash fs's still have
a mtd block.  how about network based fs's ?  how you going to signal
dropping of pages for nfs or cifs or fuse ones ?

For a regular file, mapping->host->i_sb points to the superblock this
file is on.  For a device, mapping->host->i_sb points to the superblock
corresponding to this device.  So it's always what we want.

sorry, wrong question.  i misread your original post (suggesting we
should be calling fadvise on the block instead of an arbitrary dir
handle).
-mike