Re: [PATCH v5 07/10] xfs: Commit CoW-based atomic writes atomically

[John Garry <john.g.garry@oracle.com>]

On 12/03/2025 13:54, Christoph Hellwig wrote:

+

> On Wed, Mar 12, 2025 at 09:04:07AM +0000, John Garry wrote:
>>> As already mentioned in a previous reply:  "all" might be to much.
>>> The code can only support a (relatively low) number of extents
>>> in a single transaction safely.
>>
>> Then we would need to limit the awu max to whatever can be guaranteed
>> (to fit).
> 
> Yes.  And please add a testcase that creates a badly fragmented file
> and verifies that we can handle the worst case for this limit.

ok, we can do that.

I have my own stress test for atomic writes on fragmented FSes, but I 
have not encountered a such a problem. But we need to formalize 
something though.


> 
> (although being able to reproduce the worst case btree splits might
> be hard, but at least the worst case fragmentation should be doable)
> 
>>> Assuming we could actually to the multi extent per transaction
>>> commit safely, what would be the reason to not always do it?
>>>
>>
>> Yes, I suppose that it could always be used. I would suggest that as a later
>> improvement, if you agree.
> 
> I remember running into some problems with my earlier version, but I'd
> have to dig into it.  Maybe it will resurface with the above testing,
> or it was due to my optimizations for the extent lookups.
> 

ok.

Thanks,
John