Re: [PATCH v2 18/30] virtio_fs, dax: Set up virtio_fs dax_device

Dan Williams
2019-07-18T14:30:20Z

On Thu, Jul 18, 2019 at 6:15 AM Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jul 17, 2019 at 07:27:25PM +0200, Halil Pasic wrote:
> > On Wed, 15 May 2019 15:27:03 -0400
> > Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> > > From: Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@redhat.com>
> > >
> > > Setup a dax device.
> > >
> > > Use the shm capability to find the cache entry and map it.
> > >
> > > The DAX window is accessed by the fs/dax.c infrastructure and must have
> > > struct pages (at least on x86). Use devm_memremap_pages() to map the
> > > DAX window PCI BAR and allocate struct page.
> > >
> >
> > Sorry for being this late. I don't see any more recent version so I will
> > comment here.
> >
> > I'm trying to figure out how is this supposed to work on s390. My concern
> > is, that on s390 PCI memory needs to be accessed by special
> > instructions. This is taken care of by the stuff defined in
> > arch/s390/include/asm/io.h. E.g. we 'override' __raw_writew so it uses
> > the appropriate s390 instruction. However if the code does not use the
> > linux abstractions for accessing PCI memory, but assumes it can be
> > accessed like RAM, we have a problem.
> >
> > Looking at this patch, it seems to me, that we might end up with exactly
> > the case described. For example AFAICT copy_to_iter() (3) resolves to
> > the function in lib/iov_iter.c which does not seem to cater for s390
> > oddities.
> >
> > I didn't have the time to investigate this properly, and since virtio-fs
> > is virtual, we may be able to get around what is otherwise a
> > limitation on s390. My understanding of these areas is admittedly
> > shallow, and since I'm not sure I'll have much more time to
> > invest in the near future I decided to raise concern.
> >
> > Any opinions?
>
> Hi Halil,
>
> I don't understand s390 and how PCI works there as well. Is there any
> other transport we can use there to map IO memory directly and access
> using DAX?
>
> BTW, is DAX supported for s390.
>
> I am also hoping somebody who knows better can chip in. Till that time,
> we could still use virtio-fs on s390 without DAX.

s390 has so-called "limited" dax support, see CONFIG_FS_DAX_LIMITED.
In practice that means that support for PTE_DEVMAP is missing which
means no get_user_pages() support for dax mappings. Effectively it's
only useful for execute-in-place as operations like fork() and ptrace
of dax mappings will fail.