Re: [dm-devel] Snapshot target and DAX-capable devices

Jan Kara
2018-08-31T09:15:01Z

On Thu 30-08-18 15:17:16, Jeff Moyer wrote:
> Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> writes:
>
> > On Tue 28-08-18 13:56:30, Mike Snitzer wrote:
> >> On Tue, Aug 28 2018 at 3:50am -0400,
> >> Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> wrote:
> >>
> >> > On Mon 27-08-18 16:43:28, Kani, Toshi wrote:
> >> > > On Mon, 2018-08-27 at 18:07 +0200, Jan Kara wrote:
> >> > > > Hi,
> >> > > >
> >> > > > I've been analyzing why fstest generic/081 fails when the backing device is
> >> > > > capable of DAX. The problem boils down to the failure of:
> >> > > >
> >> > > > lvm vgcreate -f vg0 /dev/pmem0
> >> > > > lvm lvcreate -L 128M -n lv0 vg0
> >> > > > lvm lvcreate -s -L 4M -n snap0 vg0/lv0
> >> > > >
> >> > > > The last command fails like:
> >> > > >
> >> > > > device-mapper: reload ioctl on (253:0) failed: Invalid argument
> >> > > > Failed to lock logical volume vg0/lv0.
> >> > > > Aborting. Manual intervention required.
> >> > > >
> >> > > > And the core of the problem is that volume vg0/lv0 is originally of
> >> > > > DM_TYPE_DAX_BIO_BASED type but when the snapshot gets created, we try to
> >> > > > switch it to DM_TYPE_BIO_BASED because now the device stops supporting DAX.
> >> > > > The problem seems to be introduced by Ross' commit dbc626597 "dm: prevent
> >> > > > DAX mounts if not supported".
> >> > > >
> >> > > > The question is whether / how this should be fixed. The current inability
> >> > > > to create snapshots of DAX-capable devices looks weird and the cryptic
> >> > > > failure makes it even worse (it took me quite a while to understand what is
> >> > > > failing and why). OTOH I see the rationale behind Ross' change as well.
> >> > >
> >> > > Here are the dm-snap changes that went along with the original DAX
> >> > > support.
> >> > >
> >> > > commit b5ab4a9ba55
> >> > > commit f6e629bd237
> >> > >
> >> > > Basically, snapshots can be added/removed to DAX-capable devices, but
> >> > > snapshots need to be mounted without dax option.
> >> >
> >> > Yes, and after these two commits things were working. But then commit
> >> > dbc626597 broke things again so currently snapshotting DAX-capable devices
> >> > does not work. Just try with 4.18...
> >>
> >> Commit f6e629bd237 was a nasty hack, and commit dbc626597 exposed it as
> >> such. But commit dbc626597 has caused us to regress.. so we need to fix
> >> it.
> >>
> >> We could remove DM_TYPE_DAX_BIO_BASED completely. But in the past I was
> >> reluctant to do so because it really is unclear how/if we can even
> >> support a device switching from DAX to non-DAX while IO is in-flight. DM
> >> supports suspending without flushing (via dmsetup suspend --noflush) and
> >> that could really be problematic if we leave DAX IO inflight and then
> >> switch the DM table such that the DM device no longer supports DAX.
> >
> > Well, changing device from DAX-capable to DAX-incapable is problematic for
> > filesystem on top of it as well. Filesystems simply don't expect this
> > feature of a device can change so they would fail in unexpected ways. Also
> > PFNs from the pmem (DAX-capable) device that are already mapped to user page
> > tables won't magically become unmapped so those processes will still have
> > DAX access to those areas of the device.
> >
> > But, if both original bdev and COW device are DAX-capable, we *should* be
> > able to support snapshotting (and refusing mixing of DAX-capable and
> > DAX-incapable devices in a snapshot is IMHO not very surprising to users).
> > When creating a snapshot of a device, we need to freeze the filesystem
> > using it. That will writeprotect all page tables so we are sure we'll get
> > page faults (and thus ->direct_access requests from DM POV) for each write
> > attempt to any mapping. Then ->direct_access method of snapshot-origin can
> > make sure to copy original contents to the COW-device before returning PFN
> > from ->direct_access. Similarly ->direct_access of COW-device can provide
> > remapped PFN so everything should work seamlessly from user POV.
>
> In your example above, if two processes have a file mapped with
> MAP_SHARED, and P1 does a store, the new contents will not be reflected
> in P2, right?. This is different from what is expected, and different
> from what happens when the page cache is involved.
>
> I think you'd need to unmap all mappings on a CoW, whether triggered by
> a store to an existing mapping or a write(2).

Yes, you are right. For COW-device we need to unmap all DAX mappings before
doing CoW. But for snapshot-origin device, we don't need that, right? As
for that case no block actually changes location. So there notification to
DM on first write access should be enough. Am I understanding the problem
right?

Honza
--
Jan Kara <jack@suse.com>
SUSE Labs, CR