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authorMatthew Wilcox <matthew.r.wilcox@intel.com>2015-01-07 18:05:34 +0200
committerJens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>2015-01-13 21:58:11 -0700
commitdd22f551ac0ad366f92f601835f6623b83adc331 (patch)
tree47f6c4f274b3b6989869734b32afdc2e5d85769d /Documentation/filesystems
parentc761d96b079e99d106fa4064e730ef7d0f312f9d (diff)
block: Change direct_access calling convention
In order to support accesses to larger chunks of memory, pass in a 'size' parameter (counted in bytes), and return the amount available at that address. Add a new helper function, bdev_direct_access(), to handle common functionality including partition handling, checking the length requested is positive, checking for the sector being page-aligned, and checking the length of the request does not pass the end of the partition. Signed-off-by: Matthew Wilcox <matthew.r.wilcox@intel.com> Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Reviewed-by: Boaz Harrosh <boaz@plexistor.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/filesystems')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/filesystems/xip.txt15
1 files changed, 9 insertions, 6 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/xip.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/xip.txt
index 0466ee569278..b77472949ede 100644
--- a/Documentation/filesystems/xip.txt
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/xip.txt
@@ -28,12 +28,15 @@ Implementation
Execute-in-place is implemented in three steps: block device operation,
address space operation, and file operations.
-A block device operation named direct_access is used to retrieve a
-reference (pointer) to a block on-disk. The reference is supposed to be
-cpu-addressable, physical address and remain valid until the release operation
-is performed. A struct block_device reference is used to address the device,
-and a sector_t argument is used to identify the individual block. As an
-alternative, memory technology devices can be used for this.
+A block device operation named direct_access is used to translate the
+block device sector number to a page frame number (pfn) that identifies
+the physical page for the memory. It also returns a kernel virtual
+address that can be used to access the memory.
+
+The direct_access method takes a 'size' parameter that indicates the
+number of bytes being requested. The function should return the number
+of bytes that can be contiguously accessed at that offset. It may also
+return a negative errno if an error occurs.
The block device operation is optional, these block devices support it as of
today: