On Tue, Sep 21, 2021 at 1:32 AM Christoph Hellwig <hch@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Tue, Sep 21, 2021 at 10:44:31AM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote: > > I think this wants to be a behavioural modifier for existing > > operations rather than an operation unto itself. i.e. similar to how > > KEEP_SIZE modifies ALLOC behaviour but doesn't fundamentally alter > > the guarantees ALLOC provides userspace. > > > > In this case, the change of behaviour over ZERO_RANGE is that we > > want physical zeros to be written instead of the filesystem > > optimising away the physical zeros by manipulating the layout > > of the file. > > Yes. > > > Then we have and API that looks like: > > > > ALLOC - allocate space efficiently > > ALLOC | INIT - allocate space by writing zeros to it > > ZERO - zero data and preallocate space efficiently > > ZERO | INIT - zero range by writing zeros to it > > > > Which seems to cater for all the cases I know of where physically > > writing zeros instead of allocating unwritten extents is the > > preferred behaviour of fallocate().... > > Agreed. I'm not sure INIT is really the right name, but I can't come > up with a better idea offhand. FUA? As in, this is a forced-unit-access zeroing all the way to media bypassing any mechanisms to emulate zero-filled payloads on future reads.
