On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 01:09:18PM -0400, Matthew Wilcox wrote: > On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 11:50:47AM -0700, Matt Mullins wrote: > > We're also developing a user of direct_access, and we ended up with some > > questions about the sleeping guarantees of the direct_access API. > > That's a great question. Since DAX can always sleep when it's calling > into bdev_direct_access(), I hadn't thought about it (DAX is basically > called to handle page faults and do I/O; both of which are expected > to sleep). > > > Since brd is currently the only (x86) implementation of DAX in Linus's tree, > > I've been testing against that. We noticed that the brd implementation of DAX > > can call into alloc_page() with __GFP_WAIT if we call direct_access() on a page > > that has not yet been allocated. This is compounded by the fact that brd does > > not support size > PAGE_SIZE (and thus I call bdev_direct_access() on each use), > > though the limitation makes sense -- I shouldn't expect the brd driver to be > > able to allocate a gigabyte of contiguous memory. > > > > The potential sleeping behavior was somewhat surprising to me, as I would expect > > the NV-DIMM device implementation to simply offset the pfn at which the device > > is located rather than perform a memory allocation. What are the guaranteed > > and/or expected contexts from which direct_access() can be safely called? > > Yes, for 'real' NV-DIMM devices, as you can see by the ones in tree, > as well as the pmem driver that Ross has been posting, it's a simple > piece of arithmetic. The question is whether we should make all users > of ->direct_access accommodate brd, or whether we should change brd so > that it doesn't sleep. > > I'm leaning towards the latter. But I'm not sure what GFP flags to > recommend that brd use ... GFP_NOWAIT | __GFP_ZERO, perhaps? What, so we get random IO failures under memory pressure? I really think we should allow .direct_access to sleep. It means we can use existing drivers and it also allows future implementations that might require, say, RDMA to be performed to update a page before access is granted. i.e. .direct_access is the first hook into the persistent device at page fault time.... Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Chinner david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx -- 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>