Published at LXer:

Posting a series of three patches, Nick Piggin announced that he was working on a rewrite of the buffer layer which he calls fsblock, "the name is fsblock because it basically ties the fs layer to the block layer." As to just what the buffer layer is, Nick explained, "the buffer layer is a layer between the pagecache and the block device for block based filesystems. It keeps a translation between logical offset and physical block number, as well as meta information such as locks, dirtyness, and IO status of each block. This information is tracked via the buffer_head structure."

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