Hello, I'm resending v4 of my DAX write-protection patches since I've messed up previous posting, mixing old and new version of the patch series... This is the fourth revision of my patches to clear dirty bits from radix tree of DAX inodes when caches for corresponding pfns have been flushed. This patch set is significantly larger than the previous version because I'm changing how ->fault, ->page_mkwrite, and ->pfn_mkwrite handlers may choose to handle the fault so that we don't have to leak details about DAX locking into the generic code. In principle, these patches enable handlers to easily update PTEs and do other work necessary to finish the fault without duplicating the functionality present in the generic code. I'd be really like feedback from mm folks whether such changes to fault handling code are fine or what they'd do differently. The patches are based on 4.9-rc1 + Ross' DAX PMD page fault series [1] + ext4 conversion of DAX IO patch to the iomap infrastructure [2]. For testing, I've pushed out a tree including all these patches and further DAX fixes to: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jack/linux-fs.git dax The patches pass testing with xfstests on ext4 and xfs on my end. I'd be grateful for review so that we can push these patches for the next merge window. [1] http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-mm/msg115247.html [2] Posted an hour ago - look for "ext4: Convert ext4 DAX IO to iomap framework" Changes since v3: * rebased on top of 4.9-rc1 + DAX PMD fault series + ext4 iomap conversion * reordered some of the patches * killed ->virtual_address field in vm_fault structure as requested by Christoph Changes since v2: * rebased on top of 4.8-rc8 - this involved dealing with new fault_env structure * changed calling convention for fault helpers Changes since v1: * make sure all PTE updates happen under radix tree entry lock to protect against races between faults & write-protecting code * remove information about DAX locking from mm/memory.c * smaller updates based on Ross' feedback ---- Background information regarding the motivation: Currently we never clear dirty bits in the radix tree of a DAX inode. Thus fsync(2) flushes all the dirty pfns again and again. This patches implement clearing of the dirty tag in the radix tree so that we issue flush only when needed. The difficulty with clearing the dirty tag is that we have to protect against a concurrent page fault setting the dirty tag and writing new data into the page. So we need a lock serializing page fault and clearing of the dirty tag and write-protecting PTEs (so that we get another pagefault when pfn is written to again and we have to set the dirty tag again). The effect of the patch set is easily visible: Writing 1 GB of data via mmap, then fsync twice. Before this patch set both fsyncs take ~205 ms on my test machine, after the patch set the first fsync takes ~283 ms (the additional cost of walking PTEs, clearing dirty bits etc. is very noticeable), the second fsync takes below 1 us. As a bonus, these patches make filesystem freezing for DAX filesystems reliable because mappings are now properly writeprotected while freezing the fs. Honza -- 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>