When VM asks a file system to provide a block to satisfy a page fault
on a file memory mapping, the file system previously had no way to
inform VM that the block is a hole, since there is no corresponding
block on the underlying device. To work around this, MFS and ext2
would actually allocate a block for the hole when asked by VM, which
not only defeats the point of holes in the first place, but also does
not work on read-only file systems. With this patch, a new libminixfs
call allows the file system to inform VM about holes. This issue does
raise the question as to whether the VM cache is using the right data
structures, since there are now two places where we have to fake a
device offset. This will have to be revisited in the future.
The patch changes file systems accordingly, and adds a test to test74.