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

[Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>]

On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 2:46 PM, Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> wrote:
> 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.

Right, but we need to not confuse the fsync code regardless of how bad
of an idea this is ::-).

>> 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,

Virtualization use cases want to give large ranges to guest-VMs, and
it is currently the only way to reliably get 1GiB mappings.

> 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...

Agreed.

Note that the "default-on policy" came from commit bbab37ddc20b
"block: Add support for DAX reads/writes to block devices" way back in
4.2.  We're just now noticing.  Credit Ross for good sanity checking.

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