On Jan 4, 2006, at 2:05 PM, Reinoud Zandijk wrote:

> one of the goals was rather to un-muddy the buffer stuff i.e.  
> cleaning up
> by trying to orthogonise buffer flags and actions.

Except that getbuf() / brelse() imply the use of the caching  
mechanism.  You then set a flag that says "oh, I'm just using this as  
an I/O descriptor", which basically makes brelse() mean nothing other  
than "pool_put()".

So, why not just remain consistent with the other parts of the kernel  
that already use a buf as an I/O descriptor rather than adding  
something that isn't actually needed just so it can be ripped out  
later anyway?

-- thorpej