Re: [PATCH v2] xfs: enable WQ_MEM_RECLAIM on m_sync_workqueue

Dave Chinner
2024-07-02T13:04:52Z

On Tue, Jul 02, 2024 at 12:33:53PM +0000, Trond Myklebust wrote:
> On Mon, 2024-07-01 at 10:13 -0400, Mike Snitzer wrote:
> > On Mon, Jul 01, 2024 at 09:46:36AM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
> > > IMO, the only sane way to ensure this sort of nested "back-end page
> > > cleaning submits front-end IO filesystem IO" mechanism works is to
> > > do something similar to the loop device. You most definitely don't
> > > want to be doing buffered IO (double caching is almost always bad)
> > > and you want to be doing async direct IO so that the submission
> > > thread is not waiting on completion before the next IO is
> > > submitted.
> >
> > Yes, follow-on work is for me to revive the directio path for localio
> > that ultimately wasn't pursued (or properly wired up) because it
> > creates DIO alignment requirements on NFS client IO:
> > https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/snitzer/linux.git/commit/?h=nfs-localio-for-6.11-testing&id=f6c9f51fca819a8af595a4eb94811c1f90051eab

I don't follow - this is page cache writeback. All the write IO from
the bdi flusher thread should be page aligned, right? So why does DIO
alignment matter here?

> > But underlying filesystems (like XFS) have the appropriate checks, we
> > just need to fail gracefully and disable NFS localio if the IO is
> > misaligned.
> >
>
> Just a reminder to everyone that this is replacing a configuration
> which would in any case result in double caching, because without the
> localio change, it would end up being a loopback mount through the NFS
> server.

Sure. That doesn't mean double caching is desirable and it's
something we try should avoid if we trying to design a fast
server bypass mechanism.

-Dave.
--
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com