From 75df713627f28f88b901b329c8857747545fd4ab Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Suresh Jayaraman Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2011 10:00:16 +0200 Subject: block: document blk-plug Thus spake Andrew Morton: "And I have the usual maintainability whine. If someone comes up to vmscan.c and sees it calling blk_start_plug(), how are they supposed to work out why that call is there? They go look at the blk_start_plug() definition and it is undocumented. I think we can do better than this?" Adapted from the LWN article - http://lwn.net/Articles/438256/ by Jens Axboe and from an earlier attempt by Shaohua Li to document blk-plug. [akpm@linux-foundation.org: grammatical and spelling tweaks] Signed-off-by: Suresh Jayaraman Cc: Shaohua Li Cc: Jonathan Corbet Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe --- block/blk-core.c | 14 ++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 14 insertions(+) (limited to 'block/blk-core.c') diff --git a/block/blk-core.c b/block/blk-core.c index 684d7eb33d4..97e9e5405b8 100644 --- a/block/blk-core.c +++ b/block/blk-core.c @@ -2595,6 +2595,20 @@ EXPORT_SYMBOL(kblockd_schedule_delayed_work); #define PLUG_MAGIC 0x91827364 +/** + * blk_start_plug - initialize blk_plug and track it inside the task_struct + * @plug: The &struct blk_plug that needs to be initialized + * + * Description: + * Tracking blk_plug inside the task_struct will help with auto-flushing the + * pending I/O should the task end up blocking between blk_start_plug() and + * blk_finish_plug(). This is important from a performance perspective, but + * also ensures that we don't deadlock. For instance, if the task is blocking + * for a memory allocation, memory reclaim could end up wanting to free a + * page belonging to that request that is currently residing in our private + * plug. By flushing the pending I/O when the process goes to sleep, we avoid + * this kind of deadlock. + */ void blk_start_plug(struct blk_plug *plug) { struct task_struct *tsk = current; -- cgit v1.2.3-18-g5258