Re: [PATCH] io_uring: add support for barrier fsync

On 4/9/19 12:42 PM, Chris Mason wrote:

On 9 Apr 2019, at 14:23, Jens Axboe wrote:

quoted

On 4/9/19 12:17 PM, Christoph Hellwig wrote:

quoted

On Tue, Apr 09, 2019 at 10:27:43AM -0600, Jens Axboe wrote:

quoted

It's a quite common use case to issue a bunch of writes, then an 
fsync
or fdatasync when they complete. Since io_uring doesn't guarantee 
any
type of ordering, the application must track issued writes and wait
with the fsync issue until they have completed.

Add an IORING_FSYNC_BARRIER flag that helps with this so the 
application
doesn't have to do this manually. If this flag is set for the fsync
request, we won't issue it until pending IO has already completed.

I think we need a much more detailed explanation of the semantics,
preferably in man page format.

Barrier at least in Linux traditionally means all previously 
submitted
requests have finished and no new ones are started until the
barrier request finishes, which is very heavy handed.  Is that what
this is supposed to do?  If not what are the exact guarantees vs
ordering and or barrier semantics?

The patch description isn't that great, and maybe the naming isn't 
that
intuitive either. The way it's implemented, the fsync will NOT be 
issued
until previously issued IOs have completed. That means both reads and
writes, since there's no way to wait for just one.  In terms of
semantics, any previously submitted writes will have completed before
this fsync is issued. The barrier fsync has no ordering wrt future
writes, no ordering is implied there. Hence:

W1, W2, W3, FSYNC_W_BARRIER, W4, W5

W1..3 will have been completed by the hardware side before we start
FSYNC_W_BARRIER. We don't wait with issuing W4..5 until after the 
fsync
completes, no ordering is provided there.

Looking at the patch, why is fsync special?  Seems like you could add 
this ordering bit to any write?

It's really not, the exact same technique could be used on any type of
command to imply ordering. My initial idea was to have an explicit
barrier/ordering command, but I didn't think that separating it from an
actual command would be needed/useful.

While you're here, do you want to add a way to FUA/cache flush?  
Basically the rest of what user land would need to make their own 
write-back-cache-safe implementation.

FUA would be a WRITEV/WRITE_FIXED flag, that should be trivially doable.

In terms of cache flush, that's very heavy handed (and storage
oriented).  What applications would want/need to do an explicit whole
device flush?

-- 
Jens Axboe