Currently, XFS uses BH_PrivateStart for flagging unwritten extent state in a
bufferhead. Recently, I found the long standing mmap/unwritten extent
conversion bug, and it was to do with partial page invalidation not clearing
the unwritten flag from bufferheads attached to the page but beyond EOF. See
here for a full explaination:
http://oss.sgi.com/archives/xfs/2006-12/msg00196.html
The solution I have checked into the XFS dev tree involves duplicating code
from block_invalidatepage to clear the unwritten flag from the bufferhead(s),
and then calling block_invalidatepage() to do the rest.
Christoph suggested that this would be better solved by pushing the unwritten
flag into the common buffer head flags and just adding the call to
discard_buffer():
http://oss.sgi.com/archives/xfs/2006-12/msg00239.html
The following patch makes BH_Unwritten a first class citizen.
Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dgc@sgi.com>
Acked-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
33a266dda9