Re: [PATCH 0/3] iopmem : A block device for PCIe memory
From: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Date: 2016-10-21 09:57:24
Also in:
linux-mm, linux-rdma, lkml, nvdimm
From: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Date: 2016-10-21 09:57:24
Also in:
linux-mm, linux-rdma, lkml, nvdimm
On Fri, Oct 21, 2016 at 10:22:39AM +1100, Dave Chinner wrote:
You do realise that local filesystems can silently change the location of file data at any point in time, so there is no such thing as a "stable mapping" of file data to block device addresses in userspace? If you want remote access to the blocks owned and controlled by a filesystem, then you need to use a filesystem with a remote locking mechanism to allow co-ordinated, coherent access to the data in those blocks. Anything else is just asking for ongoing, unfixable filesystem corruption or data leakage problems (i.e. security issues).
And at least for XFS we have such a mechanism :) E.g. I have a prototype of a pNFS layout that uses XFS+DAX to allow clients to do RDMA directly to XFS files, with the same locking mechanism we use for the current block and scsi layout in xfs_pnfs.c.