In the debate about how to support persistent memory applications that want to use hardware-platform memory-media persistence rules/cpu-instructions rather than filesystem data intergrity system calls [1], one of the consistent requests is to move these applications to use a device file rather than a filesystem file [2]. While there is still a desire to offer the same syscall overhead avoidance in filesystem-dax as device-dax, there is performance optimization work and analysis that still needs to be done. Optimization/analysis to address filesystem-dax performance being slower than the typical page-cache path on top of pmem [3], and whether the performance gains are worth developing new filesytem data integrity mechanisms. In the meantime we have device-dax and are missing a way to identify its capabilities compared to filesytem-dax. Critically, we want a persistent memory transaction library, that is handed an address range to manage, to be able to determine if it is safe to forgo calling fsync/msync to record newly allocated blocks after a write fault. This question is answered by the new VM_SYNC flag. It is also important to know if the pages behind a mapping are backed by page cache and need to be synced, or are referencing media directly. We have an XFS inode flag that can indicate the inode is DAX enabled, but nothing for device-dax or other filesystems. Yes, an application that maps /dev/dax should assume the mapping is DAX, but it is useful to be able to tell that from the address range directly, and a common mechanism across filesystems. Finally, while developing and debugging the filesystem-dax huge page support it was frustrating that the only way to unit test and verify the implementation was via debug print statements. This series extends mincore(2) to optionally provide an indication of the hardware mapping size. This is hopefully useful to other cases that want to evaluate transparent-huge-page usage. Changes since the RFC [4]: 1/ Drop DAX indication out of mincore. It is a vma capability not a per-page property and fits better as a vma flag. Multiple people indicated it would be better if the new syscall published the capability as an extent or aggregated over a range, and this facility is already provided by smaps. 2/ Add VM_SYNC to explicity disclaim a need to call fsync/msync 3/ Drop the syscall wire-up patch since it is trivial and can be revived if we decide to move forward with the new mincore syscall. [1]: https://lwn.net/Articles/676737/ [2]: https://lists.01.org/pipermail/linux-nvdimm/2016-September/006893.html [3]: https://lists.01.org/pipermail/linux-nvdimm/2016-August/006497.html [4]: https://lists.01.org/pipermail/linux-nvdimm/2016-September/006875.html --- Dan Williams (3): mm, dax: add VM_SYNC flag for device-dax VMAs mm, dax: add VM_DAX flag for DAX VMAs mm, mincore2(): retrieve tlb-size attributes of an address range drivers/dax/Kconfig | 1 drivers/dax/dax.c | 2 fs/Kconfig | 1 fs/ext2/file.c | 2 fs/ext4/file.c | 2 fs/proc/task_mmu.c | 4 + fs/xfs/xfs_file.c | 2 include/linux/mm.h | 31 +++++++- include/linux/syscalls.h | 2 include/uapi/asm-generic/mman-common.h | 2 kernel/sys_ni.c | 1 mm/mincore.c | 130 ++++++++++++++++++++++++-------- 12 files changed, 141 insertions(+), 39 deletions(-) -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>