Re: [PATCH v6 11/13] xfs: add xfs_file_dio_write_atomic()

Christoph Hellwig
2025-03-18T08:46:46Z

On Tue, Mar 18, 2025 at 08:42:36AM +0000, John Garry wrote:
>> I see that this is what's done in the current series now. But that feels
>> very wrong. Why do you want to deprive the user of this nice and useful
>> code if they don't have the right hardware?
>
> I don't think it's fair to say that we deprive the user - so far we just
> don't and nobody has asked for atomics without HW support.

You're still keeping this nice functionality from the users..

>
>> Why do we limit us to the
>> hardware supported size when we support more in software?
>
> As I see, HW offload gives fast and predictable performance.
>
> The COW method is just a (slow) fallback is when HW offload is not possible.
>
> If we want to allow the user to avail of atomics greater than the mounted
> bdev, then we should have a method to tell the user of the optimised
> threshold. They could read the bdev atomic limits and infer this, but that
> is not a good user experience.

Yes, there should be an interface to expose that. But even without
the hardware acceleration a guaranteed untorn write is a really nice
feature to have.