Re: [PATCH v2 2/2] dax: move writeback calls into the filesystems

Dave Chinner
2016-02-11T22:47:15Z

On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 12:58:38PM -0800, Dan Williams wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 12:46 PM, Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> wrote:
> [..]
> >> It seems to me we need to modify the
> >> metadata i/o paths to bypass the page cache,
> >
> > XFS doesn't use the block device page cache for it's metadata - it
> > has it's own internal metadata cache structures and uses get_pages
> > or heap memory to back it's metadata. But that doesn't make mixing
> > DAX and pages in the block device mapping tree sane.
> >
> > What you are missing here is that the underlying architecture of
> > journalling filesystems mean they can't use DAX for their metadata.
> > Modifications have to be buffered, because they have to be written
> > to the journal first before they are written back in place. IOWs, we
> > need to buffer changes in volatile memory for some time, and that
> > means we can't use DAX during transactional modifications.
> >
> > And to put the final nail in that coffin, metadata in XFS can be
> > discontiguous multi-block objects - in those situations we vmap the
> > underlying pages so they appear to the code to be a contiguous
> > buffer, and that's something we can't do with DAX....
>
> Sorry, I wasn't clear when I said "bypass page cache" I meant a
> solution similar to commit d1a5f2b4d8a1 "block: use DAX for partition
> table reads".

So there's already bandaids to prevent bad shit from happening in
the block layer, let alone when we consider all the ways that
userspace can screw this all up.

> However, I suspect that is broken if the filesystem is not ready
> to see a new page allocated for every I/O. I assume one
> thread will want to insert a page in the radix for another thread
> to find/manipulate before metadata gets written back to storage.

Right, you can't do that, especially as the struct page has a 1-1
relationship with the bufferhead that is attached to it as the
bufferhead carries the filesystem state for the given cached page.

> >> or teach the fsync code how to flush populated data pages out
> >> of the radix.
> >
> > That doesn't solve the problem. Filesystems free and reallocate
> > filesystem blocks without intermediate block device mapping
> > invalidation calls, so what is one minute a data block accessed
> > by DAX may become a metadata block that accessed via buffered
> > IO. It all goes to crap very quickly....
> >
> > However, I'd say fsync is not the place to address this. This
> > block device cache aliasing issue is supposed to be what
> > unmap_underlying_metadata() solves, right?
>
> I'll take a look at this. Right now I'm trying to implement the
> "clear block-device-inode S_DAX on fs mount" approach. My concern
> though is that we need to disable block device mmap while a
> filesystem is mounted...

/me chokes on his coffee.

When did mmaping the block device behind the back of a mounted
fileystem become a valid use case? It's not supported for normal
block devices and for the same reasons it won't be supported for DAX
enabled block devices, either. i.e. I'm going to tell anyone who has
an application that does this to go and take a hike when (not if!)
they report filesystem corruption problems.

> Maybe I don't need to worry because it's already the case that a
> mmap of the raw device may not see the most up to date data for a
> file that has dirty fs-page-cache data.

It goes both ways. What happens if mkfs or fsck modifies the
block device via mmap+DAX and then the filesystem mounts the block
device and tries to read that metadata via the block device page
cache?

Quite frankly, DAX on the block device is a can of worms we really
don't need to deal with right now. IMO it's a solution looking for a
problem to solve, the "default to on" policy is wrong (DAX is
opt-in, not opt-out) and given this we should turn it off until
we've solved the more important problems we need to solve. i.e. We
need to concentrate on getting data integrity working correctly
first, then address the cache aliasing issues, then address the
"safe access" issues, and then we can re-introduce block device DAX
access...

Cheers,

Dave.
--
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com