TBD: turn this into a real wiki article, tracing all the way from sys_read() to the block IO (or RPC, in case of NFS) subsystem. {{{ anyone could explain me I_DIRTY_PAGES I_DIRTY_SYNC I_DIRTY_DATASYNC ? coywolf: what's there to explain ? coywolf: I_DIRTY_DATASYNC means data is written out synchronously on file write I_DIRTY_SYNC means that both file data and inode metadata are written out synchronously I_DIRTY_PAGES means there are dirty pages in memory for this inode - so we're writing the data and metadata back asynchronously surriel, clear now surriel, thanks this is from the source: 998 #define I_DIRTY_SYNC 1 /* Not dirty enough for O_DATASYNC */ 999 #define I_DIRTY_DATASYNC 2 /* Data-related inode changes pending */ 1000 #define I_DIRTY_PAGES 4 /* Data-related inode changes pending */ surriel, the code comment isn't clear but the code that uses these constants is ... }}}