int ext4_alloc_da_blocks(struct inode *inode)
{
	trace_ext4_alloc_da_blocks(inode);

	if (!EXT4_I(inode)->i_reserved_data_blocks)
		return 0;

	/*
	 * We do something simple for now.  The filemap_flush() will
	 * also start triggering a write of the data blocks, which is
	 * not strictly speaking necessary (and for users of
	 * laptop_mode, not even desirable).  However, to do otherwise
	 * would require replicating code paths in:
	 *
	 * ext4_writepages() ->
	 *    write_cache_pages() ---> (via passed in callback function)
	 *        __mpage_da_writepage() -->
	 *           mpage_add_bh_to_extent()
	 *           mpage_da_map_blocks()
	 *
	 * The problem is that write_cache_pages(), located in
	 * mm/page-writeback.c, marks pages clean in preparation for
	 * doing I/O, which is not desirable if we're not planning on
	 * doing I/O at all.
	 *
	 * We could call write_cache_pages(), and then redirty all of
	 * the pages by calling redirty_page_for_writepage() but that
	 * would be ugly in the extreme.  So instead we would need to
	 * replicate parts of the code in the above functions,
	 * simplifying them because we wouldn't actually intend to
	 * write out the pages, but rather only collect contiguous
	 * logical block extents, call the multi-block allocator, and
	 * then update the buffer heads with the block allocations.
	 *
	 * For now, though, we'll cheat by calling filemap_flush(),
	 * which will map the blocks, and start the I/O, but not
	 * actually wait for the I/O to complete.
	 */
	return filemap_flush(inode->i_mapping);
}

Warm-up