Re: Linux 2.4.10-pre11

[Linus Torvalds]

On Tue, 18 Sep 2001, Alexander Viro wrote:
>
> Umm...  Linus, had you actually read through the fs/block_device.c part
> of that?  It's not just ugly as hell, it's (AFAICS) not hard to oops
> if you have several inodes sharing major:minor.  ->bd_inode and its
> treatment are bogus.  Please, read it through and consider reverting -
> in its current state code is an ugly mess.

Funny that you mention it, because I actually have a cunning plan, and
you're an unwitting part of it.

Or actually, I hope you're a "witting" part of it, because it's going to
be your code.

Take your "struct block_device" code, add a "struct address_space" to it,
and whenever a block device inode is opened, make the inode->i_mapping
point to &bdev->b_data, and voila..

You already get all the reference counting right, and it's the only
sensible place to do it anyway, wouldn't you agree?

I thought you'd be thrilled. It seems to match your lazy allocation patch
very well..

		Linus