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 <sjayaraman@suse.de>
Cc: Shaohua Li <shaohua.li@intel.com>
Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
diff --git a/block/blk-core.c b/block/blk-core.c
index 684d7eb..97e9e54 100644
--- a/block/blk-core.c
+++ b/block/blk-core.c
@@ -2595,6 +2595,20 @@
#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;