On 11/17/2012 12:48 PM, Hugh Dickins wrote:

Further offtopic..

Hi Hugh,

- I see you add this in vfs.txt:
   +  fallocate: called by the VFS to preallocate blocks or punch a hole.
   I want to know if it's necessary to add it to man page since users 
still don't know fallocate can punch a hole from man fallocate.
- in function shmem_fallocate:
+               else if (shmem_falloc.nr_unswapped > 
shmem_falloc.nr_falloced)
+                       error = -ENOMEM;
If this changelog "shmem_fallocate() compare counts and give up once the 
reactivated pages have started to coming back to writepage 
(approximately: some zones would in fact recycle faster than others)." 
describe why need this change? If the answer is yes, I have two questions.
1) how can guarantee it really don't need preallocation if just one or a 
few pages always reactivated, in this scene, nr_unswapped maybe grow 
bigger enough than shmem_falloc.nr_falloced
2) why return -ENOMEM, it's not really OOM, is it a trick or ...?

Regards,
Jaegeuk

On Fri, 16 Nov 2012, Jaegeuk Hanse wrote:

quoted

Some questions about your shmem/tmpfs: misc and fallocate patchset.

- Since shmem_setattr can truncate tmpfs files, why need add another similar
codes in function shmem_fallocate? What's the trick?

I don't know if I understand you.  In general, hole-punching is different
from truncation.  Supporting the hole-punch mode of the fallocate system
call is different from supporting truncation.  They're closely related,
and share code, but meet different specifications.

quoted

- in tmpfs: support fallocate preallocation patch changelog:
   "Christoph Hellwig: What for exactly?  Please explain why preallocating on
tmpfs would make any sense.
   Kay Sievers: To be able to safely use mmap(), regarding SIGBUS, on files on
the /dev/shm filesystem.  The glibc fallback loop for -ENOSYS [or
-EOPNOTSUPP] on fallocate is just ugly."
   Could shmem/tmpfs fallocate prevent one process truncate the file which the
second process mmap() and get SIGBUS when the second process access mmap but
out of current size of file?

Again, I don't know if I understand you.  fallocate does not prevent
truncation or races or SIGBUS.  I believe that Kay meant that without
using fallocate to allocate the memory in advance, systemd found it hard
to protect itself from the possibility of getting a SIGBUS, if access to
a shmem mapping happened to run out of memory/space in the middle.

I never grasped why writing the file in advance was not good enough:
fallocate happened to be what they hoped to use, and it was hard to
deny it, given that tmpfs already supported hole-punching, and was
about to convert to the fallocate interface for that.

Hugh

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