On 03/26/2015 09:32 PM, Dave Chinner wrote: <> >> 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.... > I agree with Dave. Last I tried (couple years ago) doing any allocation GFP_NOWAIT on FS IO paths fails really badly in all kind of surprising ways. The Kernel is built in to that allocation pressure. I think that ->direct_access should not be any different then any other block-device access, ie allow to sleep. With brd a user can make sure not to sleep if he pre-allocates ie call ->direct_access at least once on a given offset-length. But I would not like to even do that guaranty. ->direct_access should be allowed to sleep. Well written code has many ways to allow sleep yet be very low latency. (So I do not see what we are missing) > Cheers, > Dave. Thanks Boaz -- 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>