The ref counts now are handled in a straightforward method:
The pre-built subtrees serve as snapshots of potentially shared nodes.
They hold an initial ref count on the pre-built nodes and their children.
The temporary ref counts are later dropped at the end of device building.
This way fixes the ref counts of unshifted nodes, thus the 'reserve'
operation introduced by commit 6d16c58 is reverted.
The blocks storing metadata itself are located continuously within
a certain reserved range, hence there's no need to use a block set
as the representation.
A leaf node should be counted only if it is referenced by some internal
nodes, since the leaves generated by <def> sections might be unshifted
and merged with exclusive mappings or other shared defs, or they might
not even be used by any of the devices if the xml was tampered. The
internal nodes should be handled in the same manner.
The new 'reserve' operation is designed for this purpose. Applications
could reserve a block for later use, without setting its ref count
immediately. This way saves the hassles of tracking unused leaves.
- Fix out-of-bounds index
- Automatically flush queued writes before function return
- Track allocated blocks in write_batcher (might be space consuming)
