Commits
NeilBrown committed 2b75869bba6
sysfs/kernfs: allow attributes to request write buffer be pre-allocated. md/raid allows metadata management to be performed in user-space. A various times, particularly on device failure, the metadata needs to be updated before further writes can be permitted. This means that the user-space program which updates metadata much not block on writeout, and so must not allocate memory. mlockall(MCL_CURRENT|MCL_FUTURE) and pre-allocation can avoid all memory allocation issues for user-memory, but that does not help kernel memory. Several kernel objects can be pre-allocated. e.g. files opened before any writes to the array are permitted. However some kernel allocation happens in places that cannot be pre-allocated. In particular, writes to sysfs files (to tell md that it can now allow writes to the array) allocate a buffer using GFP_KERNEL. This patch allows attributes to be marked as "PREALLOC". In that case the maximal buffer is allocated when the file is opened, and then used on each write instead of allocating a new buffer. As the same buffer is now shared for all writes on the same file description, the mutex is extended to cover full use of the buffer including the copy_from_user(). The new __ATTR_PREALLOC() 'or's a new flag in to the 'mode', which is inspected by sysfs_add_file_mode_ns() to determine if the file should be marked as requiring prealloc. Despite the comment, we *do* use ->seq_show together with ->prealloc in this patch. The next patch fixes that. Signed-off-by: NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de> Reviewed-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>