Re: How to setup a buffer_head in a driver

Andrew Morton (akpm@digeo.com)
Tue, 14 Jan 2003 15:14:35 -0800


On Tuesday 14 January 2003 02:35 pm, Brian Kelly wrote:
>
> Hi,
> I'm writing a device driver that among other things needs to write data,
> manufactured by the driver itself, to a block device.
>
> I have this data in block sized kmalloc()'d chunks. So what I'm doing is
> allocating a struct buffer_head, initialising it, fill out it's various
> fields and send it to generic_make_request().

It's probably better to use submit_bh(). Set the BH_Lock and BH_Mapped bits,
also set up b_end_io. Then do a wait_on_buffer(), wait for the IO to
complete. There's some similar code in
fs/jbd/journal.c:journal_write_metadata_buffer().

However, what you're doing is an odd thing. If there is already pagecache
against that block device then the kernel doesn't know that you've changed
the bytes on-disk and will cheerfully proceed to use (and write out) the
cached data. You'll lose your modifications..

It would be better to use sb_getblk() or bread(), to lock the returned
buffer_head, then copy your data into it and to then write it back with
submit_bh() or ll_rw_block(). Or just leave it dirty and let the kernel
write it out in due course.

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