On Thu, May 31, 2007 at 08:26:45AM +0200, Jens Axboe wrote: > On Thu, May 31 2007, David Chinner wrote: > > IOWs, there are two parts to the problem: > > > > 1 - guaranteeing I/O ordering > > 2 - guaranteeing blocks are on persistent storage. > > > > Right now, a single barrier I/O is used to provide both of these > > guarantees. In most cases, all we really need to provide is 1); the > > need for 2) is a much rarer condition but still needs to be > > provided. > > > > > if I am understanding it correctly, the big win for barriers is that you > > > do NOT have to stop and wait until the data is on persistant media before > > > you can continue. > > > > Yes, if we define a barrier to only guarantee 1), then yes this > > would be a big win (esp. for XFS). But that requires all filesystems > > to handle sync writes differently, and sync_blockdev() needs to > > call blkdev_issue_flush() as well.... > > > > So, what do we do here? Do we define a barrier I/O to only provide > > ordering, or do we define it to also provide persistent storage > > writeback? Whatever we decide, it needs to be documented.... > > The block layer already has a notion of the two types of barriers, with > a very small amount of tweaking we could expose that. There's absolutely > zero reason we can't easily support both types of barriers. That sounds like a good idea - we can leave the existing WRITE_BARRIER behaviour unchanged and introduce a new WRITE_ORDERED behaviour that only guarantees ordering. The filesystem can then choose which to use where appropriate.... Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Chinner Principal Engineer SGI Australian Software Group - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
