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  • David Howells's avatar
    [PATCH] add page_mkwrite() vm_operations method · 9637a5ef
    David Howells authored 
    

Add a new VMA operation to notify a filesystem or other driver about the
MMU generating a fault because userspace attempted to write to a page
mapped through a read-only PTE.

This facility permits the filesystem or driver to:

 (*) Implement storage allocation/reservation on attempted write, and so to
     deal with problems such as ENOSPC more gracefully (perhaps by generating
     SIGBUS).

 (*) Delay making the page writable until the contents have been written to a
     backing cache. This is useful for NFS/AFS when using FS-Cache/CacheFS.
     It permits the filesystem to have some guarantee about the state of the
     cache.

 (*) Account and limit number of dirty pages. This is one piece of the puzzle
     needed to make shared writable mapping work safely in FUSE.

Needed by cachefs (Or is it cachefiles?  Or fscache? <head spins>).

At least four other groups have stated an interest in it or a desire to use
the functionality it provides: FUSE, OCFS2, NTFS and JFFS2.  Also, things like
EXT3 really ought to use it to deal with the case of shared-writable mmap
encountering ENOSPC before we permit the page to be dirtied.

From: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>

  get_user_pages(.write=1, .force=1) can generate COW hits on read-only
  shared mappings, this patch traps those as mkpage_write candidates and fails
  to handle them the old way.

Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Cc: Miklos Szeredi <miklos@szeredi.hu>
Cc: Joel Becker <Joel.Becker@oracle.com>
Cc: Mark Fasheh <mark.fasheh@oracle.com>
Cc: Anton Altaparmakov <aia21@cantab.net>
Cc: David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
    9637a5ef