Re: Problems with VM_MIXEDMAP removal from /proc/<pid>/smaps

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

On Thu, Oct 4, 2018 at 11:35 PM Johannes Thumshirn <jthumshirn@suse.de> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Oct 04, 2018 at 11:25:24PM -0700, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > Since when is an article on some website a promise (of what exactly)
> > by linux kernel developers?
>
> Let's stop it here, this doesn't make any sort of forward progress.
>

I do think there is some progress we can make if we separate DAX as an
access mechanism vs DAX as a resource utilization contract. My attempt
at representing Christoph's position is that the kernel should not be
advertising / making access mechanism guarantees. That makes sense.
Even with MAP_SYNC+DAX the kernel reserves the right to write-protect
mappings at will and trap access into a kernel handler. Additionally,
whether read(2) / write(2) does anything different behind the scenes
in DAX mode, or not should be irrelevant to the application.

That said what is certainly not irrelevant is a kernel giving
userspace visibility and control into resource utilization. Jan's
MADV_DIRECT_ACCESS let's the application make assumptions about page
cache utilization, we just need to another mechanism to read if a
mapping is effectively already in that state.