On Tue 05-02-19 09:50:59, Ira Weiny wrote: > The problem: Once we have pages marked as GUP-pinned how should various > subsystems work with those markings. > > The current work for John Hubbards proposed solutions (part 1 and 2) is > progressing.[1] But the final part (3) of his solution is also going to take > some work. > > In Johns presentation he lists 3 alternatives for gup-pinned pages: > > 1) Hold off try_to_unmap > 2) Allow writeback while pinned (via bounce buffers) > [Note this will not work for DAX] Well, but DAX does not need it because by definition there's nothing to writeback :) > 3) Use a "revocable reservation" (or lease) on those pages > 4) Pin the blocks as busy in the FS allocator > > The problem with lease's on pages used by RDMA is that the references to > these pages is not local to the machine. Once the user has been given > access to the page they, through the use of a remote tokens, give a > reference to that page to remote nodes. This is the core essence of > RDMA, and like it or not, something which is increasingly used by major > Linux users. > > Therefore we need to discuss the extent by which leases are appropriate and > what happens should a lease be revoked which a user does not respond to. I don't know the RDMA hardware so this is just an opinion of filesystem / mm guy but my idea how this should work would be: MM/FS asks for lease to be revoked. The revoke handler agrees with the other side on cancelling RDMA or whatever and drops the page pins. Now I understand there can be HW / communication failures etc. in which case the driver could either block waiting or make sure future IO will fail and drop the pins. But under normal conditions there should be a way to revoke the access. And if the HW/driver cannot support this, then don't let it anywhere near DAX filesystem. Honza -- Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxxx> SUSE Labs, CR