Re: [PATCH 00/31] Swap over NFS -v20

On Thursday October 1, hch@infradead.org wrote:

The other really big one is adding a proper method for safe, page-backed
kernelspace I/O on files.  That is not something like the grotty
swap-tied address_space operations in this patch, but more something in
the direction of the kernel direct I/O patches from Jenx Axboe he did
for using in the loop driver.  But even those aren't complete as they
don't touch the locking issue yet.

Do you have a problem with the proposed address_space operations apart
from their names including the word "swap"?  Would something like:
  direct_on, direct_off, direct_read, direct_write
be better.
Semantics being that the read and write:
  - bypass the page cache (invalidation is up to caller)
  - must not make a blocking non-emergency memory allocation
direct_on does any pre-allocation and pre-reading to ensure those
semantics and be provided.

I have wondered if an extra flag along the lines of "I don't care
about this data after a crash" would be useful.
It would be set for swap, but not set for other users.  Thus
e.g. RAID1 could easily avoid resyncing an area that was used only for
swap.

The only thing of Jens' that I could find used bmap - is there
something more recent I should look for?

Especially the latter is an absolutely essential step to make any
progress here, and an excellent patch series of it's own as there are
multiple users for this, like making swap safe on btrfs files, making
the MD bitmap code actually safe or improving the loop driver.

100% agree.

Thanks,
NeilBrown

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