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  • 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 we're not playing crazy games with it), so
    under memory intensive situations, footprint should effectively be the same --
    maybe even a slight advantage to the new driver because it can also reclaim
    buffer heads.
    
    The fact that it now goes through all the regular vm/fs paths makes it
    much more useful for testing, too.
    
       text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
       2837     849     384    4070     fe6 drivers/block/rd.o
       3528     371      12    3911     f47 drivers/block/brd.o
    
    Text is larger, but data and bss are smaller, making total size smaller.
    
    A few other nice things about it:
    - Similar structure and layout to the new loop device handlinag.
    - Dynamic ramdisk creation.
    - Runtime flexible buffer head size (because it is no longer part of the
      ramdisk code).
    - Boot / load time flexible ramdisk size, which could easily be extended
      to a per-ramdisk runtime changeable size (eg. with an ioctl).
    - Can use highmem for the backing store.
    
    [akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix build]
    [byron.bbradley@gmail.com: make rd_size non-static]
    Signed-off-by: default avatarNick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarByron Bradley <byron.bbradley@gmail.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    9db5579b