Re: (reiserfs) Re: RFC: Re: journal ports for 2.3?

[Andrea Arcangeli]

On Thu, 23 Dec 1999, Hans Reiser wrote:

>If reiserfs had good SMP, you could stall it anywhere, and the code
>could handle that.  But we don't, and I bet others also don't, and we
>won't have it for some time even though we are working on it.

I completly understand that we need also an atomic mark_buffer_dirty and
to call buffer_dirty from some other place.

But IMHO there's no one good reason to break all the old rock solid
filesystems like ext2 just because there's the need of a new feature.

I am not proposing to not provide a way to atomically marking a buffer
dirty. I propose only to not change the semantic of the function called
`mark_buffer_dirty()' as it happened now.

If you want the atomic version just recall __mark_buffer_dirty() and use
balance_dirty() by hand as soon as you can (after releasing your SMP
locks).

We can trivially replace mark_buffer_dirty() with __mark_buffer_dirty()
with an automated script inside smart/SMP filesystems that wants to
continue to use the current 2.3.x semantic of mark_buffer_dirty().

Andrea