From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Vladislav Bolkhovitin Subject: Re: [sqlite] light weight write barriers Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2012 00:02:51 -0500 Message-ID: <50A71A7B.3040407@vlnb.net> References: <5086F5A7.9090406@vlnb.net> <20121025051445.GA9860@thunk.org> <508B3EED.2080003@vlnb.net> <20121027044456.GA2764@thunk.org> <5090532D.4050902@vlnb.net> <20121031095404.0ac18a4b@pyramind.ukuu.org.uk> <5092D90F.7020105@vlnb.net> <20121101212418.140e3a82@pyramind.ukuu.org.uk> <50931601.4060102@symas.com> <20121102123359.2479a7dc@pyramind.ukuu.org.uk> <50A1C15E.2080605@vlnb.net> <20121113174000.6457a68b@pyramind.ukuu.org.uk> <50A442AF.9020407@vlnb.net> <50A52133.9050204@cs.utoronto.ca> <50A56E43.3040805@genband.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Ryan Johnson , General Discussion of SQLite Database , Vladislav Bolkhovitin , Nico Williams , linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, Theodore Ts'o , linux-kernel , Richard Hipp To: Chris Friesen Return-path: In-Reply-To: <50A56E43.3040805@genband.com> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-fsdevel.vger.kernel.org Chris Friesen, on 11/15/2012 05:35 PM wrote: >> The easiest way to implement this fsync would involve three things: >> 1. Schedule writes for all dirty pages in the fs cache that belong to >> the affected file, wait for the device to report success, issue a cache >> flush to the device (or request ordering commands, if available) to make >> it tell the truth, and wait for the device to report success. AFAIK this >> already happens, but without taking advantage of any request ordering >> commands. >> 2. The requesting thread returns as soon as the kernel has identified >> all data that will be written back. This is new, but pretty similar to >> what AIO already does. >> 3. No write is allowed to enqueue any requests at the device that >> involve the same file, until all outstanding fsync complete [3]. This is >> new. > > This sounds interesting as a way to expose some useful semantics to userspace. > > I assume we'd need to come up with a new syscall or something since it doesn't > match the behaviour of posix fsync(). This is how I would export cache sync and requests ordering abstractions to the user space: For async IO (io_submit() and friends) I would extend struct iocb by flags, which would allow to set the required capabilities, i.e. if this request is FUA, or full cache sync, immediate [1] or not, ORDERED or not, or all at the same time, per each iocb. For the regular read()/write() I would add to "flags" parameter of sync_file_range() one more flag: if this sync is immediate or not. To enforce ordering rules I would add one more command to fcntl(). It would make the latest submitted write in this fd ORDERED. All together those should provide the requested functionality in a simple, effective, unambiguous and backward compatible manner. Vlad 1. See my other today's e-mail about what is immediate cache sync.