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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...
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