Re: [PATCH 0/3] dax: clear poison on the fly along pwrite

[Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>]

On Wed, Sep 15, 2021 at 01:27:47PM -0700, Dan Williams wrote:
> > Yeah, Christoph suggested that we make the clearing operation explicit
> > in a related thread a few weeks ago:
> > https://lore.kernel.org/linux-fsdevel/YRtnlPERHfMZ23Tr@infradead.org/
> 
> That seemed to be tied to a proposal to plumb it all the way out to an
> explicit fallocate() mode, not make it a silent side effect of
> pwrite().

Yes.

> >
> > Each of the dm drivers has to add their own ->clear_poison operation
> > that remaps the incoming (sector, len) parameters as appropriate for
> > that device and then calls the lower device's ->clear_poison with the
> > translated parameters.
> >
> > This (AFAICT) has already been done for dax_zero_page_range, so I sense
> > that Dan is trying to save you a bunch of code plumbing work by nudging
> > you towards doing s/dax_clear_poison/dax_zero_page_range/ to this series
> > and then you only need patches 2-3.
> 
> Yes, but it sounds like Christoph was saying don't overload
> dax_zero_page_range(). I'd be ok splitting the difference and having a
> new fallocate clear poison mode map to dax_zero_page_range()
> internally.

That was my gut feeling.  If everyone feels 100% comfortable with
zeroingas the mechanism to clear poisoning I'll cave in.  The most
important bit is that we do that through a dedicated DAX path instead
of abusing the block layer even more.

> 
> >
> > > BTW, our customer doesn't care about creating dax volume thru DM, so.
> >
> > They might not care, but anything going upstream should work in the
> > general case.
> 
> Agree.

I'm really worried about both patartitions on DAX and DM passing through
DAX because they deeply bind DAX to the block layer, which is just a bad
idea.  I think we also need to sort that whole story out before removing
the EXPERIMENTAL tags.