fat: switch to fsinfo_inode
Currently FAT file-system maps the VFS "superblock" abstraction to the
FSINFO block. The FSINFO block contains non-essential data about the
amount of free clusters and the next free cluster. FAT file-system can
always find out this information by scanning the FAT table, but having it
in the FSINFO block may speed things up sometimes. So FAT file-system
relies on the VFS superblock write-out services to make sure the FSINFO
block is written out to the media from time to time.
The whole "superblock write-out" VFS infrastructure is served by the
'sync_supers()' kernel thread, which wakes up every 5 (by default) seconds
and writes out all dirty superblock using the '->write_super()' call-back.
But the problem with this thread is that it wastes power by waking up the
system every 5 seconds no matter what. So we want to kill it completely
and thus, we need to make file-systems to stop using the '->write_super'
VFS service, and then remove it together with the kernel thread.
This patch switches the FAT FSINFO block management from
'->write_super()'/'->s_dirt' to 'fsinfo_inode'/'->write_inode'. Now,
instead of setting the 's_dirt' flag, we just mark the special
'fsinfo_inode' inode as dirty and let VFS invoke the '->write_inode'
call-back when needed, where we write-out the FSINFO block.
This patch also makes sure we do not mark the 'fsinfo_inode' inode as
dirty if we are not FAT32 (FAT16 and FAT12 do not have the FSINFO block)
or if we are in R/O mode.
As a bonus, we can also remove the '->sync_fs()' and '->write_super()' FAT
call-back function because they become unneeded.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <artem.bityutskiy@linux.intel.com>
Cc: OGAWA Hirofumi <hirofumi@mail.parknet.co.jp>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2 files changed