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: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Byron Bradley <byron.bbradley@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
