this. Hence after submission of the second IO, we'd end up this state: IO 1 IO 2 IO 3 IO 4 +-------+-------+-------+-------+ ^ ^ | | | | | | | \- ip->i_new_size \- ip->i_size There is no need to grab the i_mutex of the IO lock in exclusive mode if we don't need to invalidate the page cache. Taking these locks on every direct IO effective serialises them as taking the IO lock in exclusive mode has to wait for all shared holders to drop the lock. That only happens when IO is complete, so effective it prevents dispatch of concurrent direct IO writes to the same inode. And so you can see that for the third concurrent IO, we'd avoid exclusive locking for the same reason we avoided the exclusive lock for the second IO. Fixing this is a bit more complex than that, because we need to hold a write-submission local value of ip->i_new_size to that clearing the value is only done if no other thread has updated it before our IO completes..... Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner Signed-off-by: Alex Elder IÛTLä