>And as the normal filesystems are all using the common buffer routines
>anyway, it's only the special cases tat are hurt by having to explicitly
I checked ext2 and it seems possible to generate lots of dirty buffers by
creating lots of empty file in a directory (only calling creat(2) with
different strings lots of times). It seems to me that the application that
is creating all such dir-entries will never block and so the VM will
collapse if there will be too much dirty buffers. Also if somebody else is
writing some data, he will find himself _always_ blocked and the process
that is creating dir-entries will run without sleep at maximal priority
(and this is very unfair in a multiuser system).
To solve this problem we can put the balance_dirty() in some strategical
place of fs/ext2/namei.c (not only in ext2_add_entry, since also rmdir
will need to mark the buffer dirty for example) but IMO that's too much
dirty. I like things that works by magic and safely ;).
Andrea
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