Re: [PATCH 05/15] mm: allow read-ahead with IOCB_NOWAIT set

Matthew Wilcox
2020-06-24T01:47:03Z

On Wed, Jun 24, 2020 at 11:02:53AM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 08:43:45AM -0600, Jens Axboe wrote:
> > The read-ahead shouldn't block, so allow it to be done even if
> > IOCB_NOWAIT is set in the kiocb.
>
> Doesn't think break preadv2(RWF_NOWAIT) semantics for on buffered
> reads? i.e. this can now block on memory allocation for the page
> cache, which is something RWF_NOWAIT IO should not do....

Yes. This eventually ends up in page_cache_readahead_unbounded()
which gets its gfp flags from readahead_gfp_mask(mapping).

I'd be quite happy to add a gfp_t to struct readahead_control.
The other thing I've been looking into for other reasons is adding
a memalloc_nowait_{save,restore}, which would avoid passing down
the gfp_t.