Re: [PATCH 4/5] dax: remove the copy_from_iter and copy_to_iter methods

Christoph Hellwig
2021-12-13T08:23:25Z

On Sun, Dec 12, 2021 at 06:44:26AM -0800, Dan Williams wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 10, 2021 at 6:17 AM Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@redhat.com> wrote:
> > Going forward, I am wondering should virtiofs use flushcache version as
> > well. What if host filesystem is using DAX and mapping persistent memory
> > pfn directly into qemu address space. I have never tested that.
> >
> > Right now we are relying on applications to do fsync/msync on virtiofs
> > for data persistence.
>
> This sounds like it would need coordination with a paravirtualized
> driver that can indicate whether the host side is pmem or not, like
> the virtio_pmem driver. However, if the guest sends any fsync/msync
> you would still need to go explicitly cache flush any dirty page
> because you can't necessarily trust that the guest did that already.

Do we? The application can't really know what backend it is on, so
it sounds like the current virtiofs implementation doesn't really, does it?