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From: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
To: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>, torvalds@linux-foundation.org
Cc: Dmitry Monakhov <dmonlist@gmail.com>,
	Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>,
	Ext4 Developers List <linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org>,
	linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, linux-api@vger.kernel.org
Subject: O_DIRECT as a hint, was: Re: [PATCH] ext4: refuse O_DIRECT opens for mode where DIO doesn't work
Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2016 01:14:51 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20160426081451.GA25616@infradead.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20160425234946.GB26977@dastard>

On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 09:49:46AM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
> Why not just transparently fall back to buffered IO if direct IO
> cannot be done? Saves people from wondering why applications fail
> on one ext4 filesystem and not another....

I've been doing an audit of our direct I/O implementations, and most
of them does some form of transparent fallback, including some that
only pretend to support O_DIRECT, but do anything special for it at all,
while at the same time we go through greast efforts to check a file
system actualy supports direct I/O, leading to nasty no-op ->direct_IO
implementations as we even got that abstraction wrong.

At this point I wonder if we should simply treat O_DIRECT as a hint
and always allow it, and just let the file system optimize for it
(skip buffering, require alignment, relaxed Posix atomicy requirements)
if it is set.

       reply	other threads:[~2016-04-26  8:14 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 8+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
     [not found] <1461472078-20104-1-git-send-email-tytso@mit.edu>
     [not found] ` <877ffmhvzt.fsf@openvz.org>
     [not found]   ` <20160425234946.GB26977@dastard>
2016-04-26  8:14     ` Christoph Hellwig [this message]
2016-04-26 15:07       ` O_DIRECT as a hint, was: Re: [PATCH] ext4: refuse O_DIRECT opens for mode where DIO doesn't work Mike Marshall
2016-04-27  2:16       ` Theodore Ts'o
2016-04-27  2:22         ` Eric Sandeen
2016-04-27  2:25         ` Dave Chinner
2016-04-27  2:27       ` Dave Chinner
2016-04-27  3:25         ` Theodore Ts'o
2016-04-27  3:37           ` Dave Chinner

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