On Fri, Jan 29, 2021 at 5:51 AM Pavel Tatashin
[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Since we last talked about this the enabling for EFI "Special Purpose"
/ Soft Reserved Memory has gone upstream and instantiates device-dax
instances for address ranges marked with EFI_MEMORY_SP attribute.
Critically this way of declaring device-dax removes the consideration
of it as persistent memory and as such no metadata reservation. So, if
you are willing to maintain the metadata external to the device (which
seems reasonable for your environment) and have your platform firmware
/ kernel command line mark it as EFI_CONVENTIONAL_MEMORY +
EFI_MEMORY_SP, then these reserve-free dax-devices will surface.

Hi Dan,

This is cool. Does it allow conversion between devdax and fsdax so DAX
aware filesystem can be installed and data can be put there to be
preserved across the reboot?

It does not because it's not "pmem" by this designation.

Instead if you want fsdax, zero metadata on the device, and the
ability to switch from fsdax to devdax I think that could be achieved
with a new sysfs attribute at the region-device level. Currently the
mode of a namespace with no metadata on it defaults to "raw" mode
where "raw" treats the pmem as a persistent memory block device with
no DAX capability. There's no reason the default could instead be
devdax with pages mapped.

Something like:
ndctl disable-region region0
echo 1 > /sys/bus/nd/devices/region0/pagemap
echo devdax > /sys/bus/nd/devices/region0/raw_default
ndctl enable-region region0

...where the new pagemap attribute does set_bit(ND_REGION_PAGEMAP,
&nd_region->flags), and raw_default arranges for the namespace to be
shunted over to devdax.

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