Re: [PATCH v10 00/21] Support ext4 on NV-DIMMs

One Thousand Gnomes
2014-08-27T23:05:05Z

On Wed, 27 Aug 2014 14:30:55 -0700
Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

> On Wed, 27 Aug 2014 16:22:20 -0500 (CDT) Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com> wrote:
>
> > > Some explanation of why one would use ext4 instead of, say,
> > > suitably-modified ramfs/tmpfs/rd/etc?
> >
> > The NVDIMM contents survive reboot and therefore ramfs and friends wont
> > work with it.
>
> See "suitably modified". Presumably this type of memory would need to
> come from a particular page allocator zone. ramfs would be unweildy
> due to its use to dentry/inode caches, but rd/etc should be feasible.

If you took one of the existing ramfs types you would then need to

- make it persistent in its storage, and put all the objects in the store
- add journalling for failures mid transaction. Your dimm may retain its
bits but if your CPU reset mid fs operation its got to be recovered
- write an fsck tool for it
- validate it

at which point it's probably turned into ext4 8)

It's persistent but that doesn't solve the 'my box crashed' problem.

Alan