Re: [PATCH RFC 00/10] RDMA/FS DAX truncate proposal

Matthew Wilcox
2019-06-13T15:27:59Z

On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 10:25:55AM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
> e.g. Process A has an exclusive layout lease on file F. It does an
> IO to file F. The filesystem IO path checks that Process A owns the
> lease on the file and so skips straight through layout breaking
> because it owns the lease and is allowed to modify the layout. It
> then takes the inode metadata locks to allocate new space and write
> new data.
>
> Process B now tries to write to file F. The FS checks whether
> Process B owns a layout lease on file F. It doesn't, so then it
> tries to break the layout lease so the IO can proceed. The layout
> breaking code sees that process A has an exclusive layout lease
> granted, and so returns -ETXTBSY to process B - it is not allowed to
> break the lease and so the IO fails with -ETXTBSY.

This description doesn't match the behaviour that RDMA wants either.
Even if Process A has a lease on the file, an IO from Process A which
results in blocks being freed from the file is going to result in the
RDMA device being able to write to blocks which are now freed (and
potentially reallocated to another file).