On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 12:13 AM, Howard Chu <hyc@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Dave Chinner wrote: >> >> On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 12:59:42PM -0800, Andy Lutomirski wrote: >>> >>> On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 12:36 PM, Dave Chinner <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> > >>> If we're using dm-crypt using an NV-DIMM "block" device as cache and a >>> real disk as backing store, then ideally mmap would map the NV-DIMM >>> directly if the data in question lives there. >> >> >> dm-crypt does not use any block device as a cache. You're thinking >> about dm-cache or bcache. And neither of them are operating at the >> filesystem level or are aware of the difference between fileystem >> metadata and user data. > > > Why should that layer need to be aware? A page is a page, as far as they're > concerned. I think that, ideally, the awareness would go the other way. dm-cache (where the backing store is a normal disk but the cache storage is persistent memory) should not care what kind of page it's caching. On the other hand, the filesystem sitting on top of dm-cache should be able to tell when a page (in the device exposed by dm-cache) is actually CPU-addressable so it can avoid allocating yet another copy in pagecache. Similarly, it should be able to be notified when that page is about to stop being cpu-addressable. This might be an argument to have, in addition (or as a replacement to) direct_access, XIP ops that ask for a reference to a page, are permitted to fail (i.e. say "sorry, not CPU addressable right now), and a way to be notified when a page is going away. (This is totally unnecessary if using something like an NV-DIMM directly -- it's only important for more complicated things like dm-cache.) > > >> But talking about non-existent block layer >> functionality doesn't answer my the question about keeping user data >> and filesystem metadata needed to reference that user data >> coherent in persistent memory... > > > One of the very useful tools for PCs in the '80s was reset-survivable > RAMdisks. Given the existence of persistent memory in a machine, this is a > pretty obvious feature to provide. I think that a file on pmfs or ext4-xip will work like this. Ideally /dev/loop will be XIP-capable if the file it's sitting on top of is XIP. > > >>> If that's happening, >>> then, assuming that there are no metadata changes, you could just >>> flush the relevant hw caches. This assumes, of course, no dm-crypt, >>> no btrfs-style checksumming, and, in general, nothing else that would >>> require stable pages or similar things. >> >> >> Well yes. Data IO path transformations are another reason why we'll >> need the volatile page cache involved in the persistent memory IO >> path. It follows immediately from this that applicaitons will still >> require fsync() and other data integrity operations because they >> have no idea where the persistence domain boundary lives in the IO >> stack. > > > And my point, stated a few times now, is there should be a way for > applications to discover the existence and characteristics of persistent > memory being used in the system. Agreed. Or maybe just some very low-level library that exposes a more useful interface (e.g. sync this domain) to applications. --Andy -- 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>