On Wed, Feb 26, 2020 at 11:57:56AM -0500, Vivek Goyal wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 25, 2020 at 02:49:30PM -0800, Dan Williams wrote:
> [..]
> > > > I'm ok with replacing blkdev_issue_zeroout() with a dax operation
> > > > callback that deals with page aligned entries. That change at least
> > > > makes the error boundary symmetric across copy_from_iter() and the
> > > > zeroing path.
> > >
> > > IIUC, you are suggesting that modify dax_zero_page_range() to take page
> > > aligned start and size and call this interface from
> > > __dax_zero_page_range() and get rid of blkdev_issue_zeroout() in that
> > > path?
> > >
> > > Something like.
> > >
> > > __dax_zero_page_range() {
> > > if(page_aligned_io)
> > > call_dax_page_zero_range()
> > > else
> > > use_direct_access_and_memcpy;
> > > }
> > >
> > > And other callers of blkdev_issue_zeroout() in filesystems can migrate
> > > to calling dax_zero_page_range() instead.
> > >
> > > If yes, I am not seeing what advantage do we get by this change.
> > >
> > > - __dax_zero_page_range() seems to be called by only partial block
> > > zeroing code. So dax_zero_page_range() call will remain unused.
> > >
> > >
> > > - dax_zero_page_range() will be exact replacement of
> > > blkdev_issue_zeroout() so filesystems will not gain anything. Just that
> > > it will create a dax specific hook.
> > >
> > > In that case it might be simpler to just get rid of blkdev_issue_zeroout()
> > > call from __dax_zero_page_range() and make sure there are no callers of
> > > full block zeroing from this path.
> >
> > I think you're right. The path I'm concerned about not regressing is
> > the error clearing on new block allocation and we get that already via
> > xfs_zero_extent() and sb_issue_zeroout().
>
> Well I was wrong. I found atleast one user which uses __dax_zero_page_range()
> to zero full PAGE_SIZE blocks.
>
> xfs_io -c "allocsp 32K 0" foo.txt
That ioctl interface is deprecated and likely unused by any new
application written since 1999. It predates unwritten extents (1998)
and I don't think any native linux applications have ever used it. A
newly written DAX aware application would almost certainly not use
this interface.
IOWs, I wouldn't use it as justification for some special case
behaviour; I'm more likely to say "rip that ancient ioctl out" than
to jump through hoops because it's implementation behaviour.
Cheers,
Dave.
--
Dave Chinner
david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
