Teodore, this important because of some points. metadata for the large devices (>400T without bigalloc enabled) very large. Once buffered IO enabled this generate a very large memory consumption. (12G+ for metadata itself in page cache, and 12G+ for user memory). I don’t think half of them is useful. > 19 февр. 2021 г., в 19:18, Theodore Ts'o <tytso@xxxxxxx> написал(а): > > Alexey, > > It'd be helpful to me to understand _why_ this use case is important > for your workloads. O_DIRECT support is rarely used as far as I know, > and fs blocksize != page size is rare as well. The main use cases I > know of fs blocksize != page size is on architectures (not terribly > common) with 16k or 64k page sizes, that want to use 4k file system > blocksizes for interoperability reasons. > As i point early - e2fsprogs _FORCE_ a 1k block size in some places. Like blk64_t ext2fs_first_backup_sb(blk64_t *superblock, unsigned int *block_size, .. for (try_blocksize = EXT2_MIN_BLOCK_SIZE; try_blocksize <= EXT2_MAX_BLOCK_SIZE ; try_blocksize *= 2) { .. errcode_t ext2fs_open2(const char *name, const char *io_options, io_channel_set_blksize(fs->io, SUPERBLOCK_OFFSET); both cases will generate unliagned (from block device view) access. Without any idea which a block size is in real. > (And I suppose because mke2fs uses a 4k block size by default. Perhaps > we should change this so that the default is that mke2fs will use a > block size == page size, unless for some reason the page size is not > one supported by ext4 (although I'm not aware of any architecture > wanting page sizes > 64k), or the user explicitly specifies the block > size using "mke2fs -b».) Nice. AARCH64 / RHEL8 - is 64k page, so what about interoperability? Should AARCH64 able to read devices which created on x86_64 with 4k page size? > > Are you trying to make O_DIRECT support in e2fsprogs a first class > reason out of completeness concern? Or is this a use case which is > important in production workloads that you are familiar with? > primary goal - debugfs -D / e2image - both in production on large storages. I looking to the e2fsck because of large memory consumption. If you think O_DIRECT don’t need to be supported - lets drop this code, instead of have this completely broken now. Thanks, Alex. > Thanks, > > - Ted