Re: [Question] ext4/xfs: Default behavior changed after per-file DAX
From: "Darrick J. Wong" <djwong@kernel.org>
Date: 2021-10-28 16:42:49
Also in:
linux-fsdevel, linux-xfs
On Thu, Oct 28, 2021 at 11:29:08AM -0500, Eric Sandeen wrote:
On 10/27/21 8:14 AM, Vivek Goyal wrote:quoted
On Wed, Oct 27, 2021 at 09:33:17AM +1100, Dave Chinner wrote:...quoted
Hi Dave, Thanks for all the explanaiton and background. It helps me a lot in wrapping my head around the rationale for current design.quoted
It's perfectly reasonable. If the hardware doesn't support DAX, then we just always behave as if dax=never is set.I tried mounting non-DAX block device with dax=always and it failed saying DAX can't be used with reflink. [ 100.371978] XFS (vdb): DAX unsupported by block device. Turning off DAX. [ 100.374185] XFS (vdb): DAX and reflink cannot be used together! So looks like first check tried to fallback to dax=never as device does not support DAX. But later reflink check thought dax is enabled and did not fallback to dax=never.We need to think hard about this stuff and audit it to be sure. But, I think that reflink check should probably just be removed, now that DAX files and reflinked files can co-exist on a filesystem - it's just that they can't both be active on the /same file/. I think that even "dax=always" is still just "advisory" - it means, try to enable dax on every file. It may still fail in the same ways as dax=inode (default) + flag set may fail. But ... we should go through the whole mount option / feature set / device capability logic to be sure this is all consistent. Thanks for pointing it out!
I was rather hoping that we'd solve this problem by helping Shiyang get his two patchsets landed, and then we can eliminate the dax+reflink check entirely. [1] (dax poison notifications via rmap V7) https://lore.kernel.org/linux-xfs/20210924130959.2695749-1-ruansy.fnst@fujitsu.com/ (local) [2] (reflink + dax V10) https://lore.kernel.org/linux-xfs/20210928062311.4012070-1-ruansy.fnst@fujitsu.com/ (local) (The second patchset is AFAICT ready to go, but we still need to iron out the difficulties pointed out in the last review of patchset #1) --D
-Ericquoted
quoted
IO