Re: Problems with VM_MIXEDMAP removal from /proc//smaps

Jan Kara
2018-10-02T14:30:01Z

[Added ext4, xfs, and linux-api folks to CC for the interface discussion]

On Tue 02-10-18 14:10:39, Johannes Thumshirn wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 02, 2018 at 12:05:31PM +0200, Jan Kara wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > commit e1fb4a086495 "dax: remove VM_MIXEDMAP for fsdax and device dax" has
> > removed VM_MIXEDMAP flag from DAX VMAs. Now our testing shows that in the
> > mean time certain customer of ours started poking into /proc/<pid>/smaps
> > and looks at VMA flags there and if VM_MIXEDMAP is missing among the VMA
> > flags, the application just fails to start complaining that DAX support is
> > missing in the kernel. The question now is how do we go about this?
>
> OK naive question from me, how do we want an application to be able to
> check if it is running on a DAX mapping?

The question from me is: Should application really care? After all DAX is
just a caching decision. Sure it affects performance characteristics and
memory usage of the kernel but it is not a correctness issue (in particular
we took care for MAP_SYNC to return EOPNOTSUPP if the feature cannot be
supported for current mapping). And in the future the details of what we do
with DAX mapping can change - e.g. I could imagine we might decide to cache
writes in DRAM but do direct PMEM access on reads. And all this could be
auto-tuned based on media properties. And we don't want to tie our hands by
specifying too narrowly how the kernel is going to behave.

OTOH I understand that e.g. for a large database application the difference
between DAX and non-DAX mapping can be a difference between performs fine
and performs terribly / kills the machine so such application might want to
determine / force caching policy to save sysadmin from debugging why the
application is misbehaving.

> AFAIU DAX is always associated with a file descriptor of some kind (be
> it a real file with filesystem dax or the /dev/dax device file for
> device dax). So could a new fcntl() be of any help here? IS_DAX() only
> checks for the S_DAX flag in inode::i_flags, so this should be doable
> for both fsdax and devdax.

So fcntl() to query DAX usage is one option. Another option is the GETFLAGS
ioctl with which you can query the state of S_DAX flag (works only for XFS
currently). But that inode flag was meant more as a hint "use DAX if
available" AFAIK so that's probably not really suitable for querying
whether DAX is really in use or not. Since DAX is really about caching
policy, I was also thinking that we could use madvise / fadvise for this.
I.e., something like MADV_DIRECT_ACCESS which would return with success if
DAX is in use, with error if not. Later, kernel could use it as a hint to
really force DAX on a mapping and not try clever caching policies...
Thoughts?

Honza

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