Re: [LSF/MM TOPIC] The end of the DAX experiment

Johannes Thumshirn
2019-02-08T09:02:50Z

On 07/02/2019 22:51, Kani, Toshi wrote:
> I've also had multiple users complained about 'mount -o dax' succeeded
> by falling back to non-dax despite of their intent. Such users wasted
> many hours without knowing their setup error / current restrictions.
> The next think they always ask is how to check if dax is enabled in such
> case, and they are not happy about limited interfaces (ex. look for
> mount entry in /proc/mounts), either.

Exactly, there's a need for admins and user-space applications to check if they
can use DAX or not. See also [1] for reference.

> Same as above. Such enhancement should be possible after EXPERIMENTAL
> is removed from 'mount -o dax'. IOW, a separate EXPERIMENTAL message
> can be shown when user requests per-directory dax.

Just as a data point here, in our Kernels we've removed the EXPERIMENTAL
warning for DAX on XFS (but not EXT4) and we are supporting it for some limited
use-cases.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-fsdevel/20181002100531.GC4135@quack2.suse.cz/

Byte,
Johannes
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Johannes Thumshirn SUSE Labs Filesystems
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