Re: [PATCH v8 01/10] fs: Allow fine-grained control of folio sizes

Pankaj Raghav (Samsung)
2024-07-05T13:24:34Z

> > I suggest you handle it better than this. If the device is asking for a
> > blocksize > PMD_SIZE, you should fail to mount it.
>
> That's my point: we already do that.
>
> The largest block size we support is 64kB and that's way smaller
> than PMD_SIZE on all platforms and we always check for bs > ps
> support at mount time when the filesystem bs > ps.
>
> Hence we're never going to set the min value to anything unsupported
> unless someone makes a massive programming mistake. At which point,
> we want a *hard, immediate fail* so the developer notices their
> mistake immediately. All filesystems and block devices need to
> behave this way so the limits should be encoded as asserts in the
> function to trigger such behaviour.

I agree, this kind of bug will be encountered only during developement
and not during actual production due to the limit we have fs block size
in XFS.

>
> > If the device is
> > asking for a blocksize > PAGE_SIZE and CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE is
> > not set, you should also decline to mount the filesystem.
>
> What does CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE have to do with filesystems
> being able to use large folios?
>
> If that's an actual dependency of using large folios, then we're at
> the point where the mm side of large folios needs to be divorced
> from CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE and always supported.
> Alternatively, CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE needs to selected by the
> block layer and also every filesystem that wants to support
> sector/blocks sizes larger than PAGE_SIZE. IOWs, large folio
> support needs to *always* be enabled on systems that say
> CONFIG_BLOCK=y.

Why CONFIG_BLOCK? I think it is enough if it comes from the FS side
right? And for now, the only FS that needs that sort of bs > ps
guarantee is XFS with this series. Other filesystems such as bcachefs
that call mapping_set_large_folios() only enable it as an optimization
and it is not needed for the filesystem to function.

So this is my conclusion from the conversation:
- Add a dependency in Kconfig on THP for XFS until we fix the dependency
of large folios on THP
- Add a BUILD_BUG_ON(XFS_MAX_BLOCKSIZE > MAX_PAGECACHE_ORDER)
- Add a WARN_ON_ONCE() and clamp the min and max value in
mapping_set_folio_order_range() ?

Let me know what you all think @willy, @dave and @ryan.

--
Pankaj