From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1753943Ab2AZVpj (ORCPT ); Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:45:39 -0500 Received: from 173-166-109-252-newengland.hfc.comcastbusiness.net ([173.166.109.252]:60465 "EHLO bombadil.infradead.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752735Ab2AZVpi (ORCPT ); Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:45:38 -0500 Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:45:34 -0500 From: Christoph Hellwig To: Andrew Morton Cc: Niels de Vos , linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Al Viro , Mikulas Patocka , Jeff Moyer , "Bryn M. Reeves" Subject: Re: [PATCH v3] fs: Invalidate the cache for a parent block-device if fsync() is called for a partition Message-ID: <20120126214534.GA9319@infradead.org> References: <4F213E1A.4060808@redhat.com> <1327584802-14298-1-git-send-email-ndevos@redhat.com> <20120126134051.6add3cd2.akpm@linux-foundation.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20120126134051.6add3cd2.akpm@linux-foundation.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) X-SRS-Rewrite: SMTP reverse-path rewritten from by bombadil.infradead.org See http://www.infradead.org/rpr.html Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 01:40:51PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote: > The Right Thing To Do here is to make the kernel behave logically and > predictably, then modify the userspace tools. But if we're modifying > the userspace tools then we would just change userspace to issue a > BLKFLSBUF to /dev/sda and leave the kernel alone. The right fix is to make partition and whole disk access coherent, which is fairly simply: - create the block device inode/mapping per gendisk, and only reference count it per block_device - make sure blkdev_get_block(s) applies the correct offset if used on partitions