From: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
To: Yasunori Goto <y-goto@fujitsu.com>
Cc: "Li, Hao" <lihao2018.fnst@cn.fujitsu.com>,
"linux-xfs@vger.kernel.org" <linux-xfs@vger.kernel.org>,
"linux-nvdimm@lists.01.org" <linux-nvdimm@lists.01.org>
Subject: Re: Can we change the S_DAX flag immediately on XFS without dropping caches?
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2020 09:21:31 +1000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20200729232131.GC2005@dread.disaster.area> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <573feb69-bc38-8eb4-ee9b-7c49802eb737@fujitsu.com>
On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 11:23:21AM +0900, Yasunori Goto wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 2020/07/28 11:20, Dave Chinner wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 02:00:08AM +0000, Li, Hao wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > I have noticed that we have to drop caches to make the changing of S_DAX
> > > flag take effect after using chattr +x to turn on DAX for a existing
> > > regular file. The related function is xfs_diflags_to_iflags, whose
> > > second parameter determines whether we should set S_DAX immediately.
> > Yup, as documented in Documentation/filesystems/dax.txt. Specifically:
> >
> > 6. When changing the S_DAX policy via toggling the persistent FS_XFLAG_DAX flag,
> > the change in behaviour for existing regular files may not occur
> > immediately. If the change must take effect immediately, the administrator
> > needs to:
> >
> > a) stop the application so there are no active references to the data set
> > the policy change will affect
> >
> > b) evict the data set from kernel caches so it will be re-instantiated when
> > the application is restarted. This can be achieved by:
> >
> > i. drop-caches
> > ii. a filesystem unmount and mount cycle
> > iii. a system reboot
> >
> > > I can't figure out why we do this. Is this because the page caches in
> > > address_space->i_pages are hard to deal with?
> > Because of unfixable races in the page fault path that prevent
> > changing the caching behaviour of the inode while concurrent access
> > is possible. The only way to guarantee races can't happen is to
> > cycle the inode out of cache.
>
> I understand why the drop_cache operation is necessary. Thanks.
>
> BTW, even normal user becomes to able to change DAX flag for an inode,
> drop_cache operation still requires root permission, right?
Step back for a minute and explain why you want to be able to change
the DAX mode of a file -as a user-.
> So, if kernel have a feature for normal user can operate drop cache for "a
> inode" with
> its permission, I think it improve the above limitation, and
> we would like to try to implement it recently.
No, drop_caches is not going to be made available to users. That
makes it s trivial system wide DoS vector.
Cheers,
Dave.
--
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-07-29 23:21 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 14+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-07-28 2:00 Can we change the S_DAX flag immediately on XFS without dropping caches? Li, Hao
2020-07-28 2:20 ` Dave Chinner
2020-07-29 2:23 ` Yasunori Goto
2020-07-29 16:10 ` Ira Weiny
2020-07-31 9:12 ` Li, Hao
2020-08-05 8:10 ` Li, Hao
2020-08-05 15:44 ` Darrick J. Wong
2020-08-07 16:57 ` Ira Weiny
2020-07-31 10:04 ` Yasunori Goto
2020-07-29 23:21 ` Dave Chinner [this message]
2020-07-31 9:15 ` Li, Hao
2020-07-31 9:59 ` Yasunori Goto
2020-08-07 17:09 ` Ira Weiny
2020-08-18 9:16 ` Li, Hao
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