• Nick Piggin's avatar
    rewrite rd · 9db5579b
    Nick Piggin authored
    This is a rewrite of the ramdisk block device driver.
    
    The old one is really difficult because it effectively implements a block
    device which serves data out of its own buffer cache.  It relies on the dirty
    bit being set, to pin its backing store in cache, however there are non
    trivial paths which can clear the dirty bit (eg.  try_to_free_buffers()),
    which had recently lead to data corruption.  And in general it is completely
    wrong for a block device driver to do this.
    
    The new one is more like a regular block device driver.  It has no idea about
    vm/vfs stuff.  It's backing store is similar to the buffer cache (a simple
    radix-tree of pages), but it doesn't know anything about page cache (the pages
    in the radix tree are not pagecache pages).
    
    There is one slight downside -- direct block device access and filesystem
    metadata access goes through an extra copy and gets stored in RAM twice.
    However, this downside is only slight, because the real buffercache of the
    device is now reclaimable (because ...
    9db5579b
MAINTAINERS 94.1 KB