On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 11:32 AM, Boaz Harrosh [off-list ref] wrote:

On 05/02/2016 09:10 PM, Dan Williams wrote:
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quoted

The semantic I am talking about preserving is:

buffered / unaligned write of a bad sector => -EIO on reading into the
page cache

What about aligned buffered write? like write 0-to-eof
This still broken? (and is what restore apps do)

quoted

...and that the only guaranteed way to clear an error (assuming the
block device supports it) is an O_DIRECT write.

Sure fixing dax_do_io will guaranty that.

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quoted

I still think we're talking past each other on this point.

Yes we are!

quoted

This patch
set is not overloading error semantics, it's fixing the error handling
problem that was introduced in this commit:

   d475c6346a38 dax,ext2: replace XIP read and write with DAX I/O

...where we started overloading O_DIRECT and dax_do_io() semantics.

But above does not fix them does it? it just completely NULLs DAX for
O_DIRECT which is a great pity, why did we do all this work in the first
place.

This is hyperbole.  We don't impact "all the work" we did for the mmap
I/O case and the acceleration of the non-direct-I/O case.

And then it keeps broken the aligned buffered writes, which are still
broken after this set.

...identical to the current situation with a traditional disk.

I have by now read the v2 patches. And I think you guys did not yet try
the proper fix for dax_do_io. I think you need to go deeper into the loops
and selectively call bdev_* when error on a specific page copy. No need to
go through direct_IO path at all.

We still reach a point where the minimum granularity of
bdev_direct_access() is larger than a sector, so you end up still
needing to have the application understand how to send a properly
aligned I/O.  The semantics of how to send a properly aligned
direct-I/O are already well understood, so we simply reuse that path.

Do you need that I send you a patch to demonstrate what I mean?

I remain skeptical of what you are proposing, but yes, a patch has a
better chance to move the discussion forward.