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Date:      Wed, 18 Apr 2001 11:58:20 -0700
From:      Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net>
To:        Zhihui Zhang <zzhang@cs.binghamton.edu>
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Buffer emergence reserve
Message-ID:  <20010418115820.R976@fw.wintelcom.net>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.4.21.0104181201080.27860-100000@opal>; from zzhang@cs.binghamton.edu on Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 12:18:22PM -0400
References:  <Pine.SOL.4.21.0104181201080.27860-100000@opal>

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* Zhihui Zhang <zzhang@cs.binghamton.edu> [010418 09:18] wrote:
> 
> While looking at the code in vfs_bio.c, I notice the existence of low and
> high free buffer counters. The comments say they are there to give some
> special process like buf daemon access to emergence reserve.  I just
> don't get the reason for having this emergence reserve.  Do we allocate
> buffer in an interrupt environment? Do we need extra buffers in order to
> free buffers?  Please shed a light on this for me.  Thanks.

It's really a simple issue of:

  "sometimes to clean a buffer we need one or more buffers"

Think of some random data block at the far end of a large file.

If the indirect blocks aren't in memory you will need to bring
them in to lookup the location of the buffer you're writing
because buffers use logical offsets rather than physical ones.

-- 
-Alfred Perlstein - [bright@wintelcom.net|alfred@freebsd.org]
Represent yourself, show up at BABUG http://www.babug.org/

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