Re: [PATCH v13 0/7] fsdax: introduce fs query to support reflink

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

On Thu, Apr 21, 2022 at 12:47 AM Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Apr 20, 2022 at 10:54:59PM -0700, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > On Thu, Apr 21, 2022 at 02:35:02PM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
> > > Sure, I'm not a maintainer and just the stand-in patch shepherd for
> > > a single release. However, being unable to cleanly merge code we
> > > need integrated into our local subsystem tree for integration
> > > testing because a patch dependency with another subsystem won't gain
> > > a stable commit ID until the next merge window is .... distinctly
> > > suboptimal.
> >
> > Yes.  Which is why we've taken a lot of mm patchs through other trees,
> > sometimes specilly crafted for that.  So I guess in this case we'll
> > just need to take non-trivial dependencies into the XFS tree, and just
> > deal with small merge conflicts for the trivial ones.
>
> OK. As Naoyo has pointed out, the first dependency/conflict Ruan has
> listed looks trivial to resolve.
>
> The second dependency, OTOH, is on a new function added in the patch
> pointed to. That said, at first glance it looks to be independent of
> the first two patches in that series so I might just be able to pull
> that one patch in and have that leave us with a working
> fsdax+reflink tree.
>
> Regardless, I'll wait to see how much work the updated XFS/DAX
> reflink enablement patchset still requires when Ruan posts it before
> deciding what to do here.  If it isn't going to be a merge
> candidate, what to do with this patchset is moot because there's
> little to test without reflink enabled...

I do have a use case for this work absent the reflink work. Recall we
had a conversation about how to communicate "dax-device has been
ripped away from the fs" events and we ended up on the idea of reusing
->notify_failure(), but with the device's entire logical address range
as the notification span. That will let me unwind and delete the
PTE_DEVMAP infrastructure for taking extra device references to hold
off device-removal. Instead ->notify_failure() arranges for all active
DAX mappings to be invalidated and allow the removal to proceed
especially since physical removal does not care about software pins.