Re: [PATCHSET v3.1 0/7] data integrity: Stabilize pages duringwriteback for various fses

From: Darrick J. Wong
Date: Wed May 11 2011 - 14:19:14 EST


On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 02:51:24PM +0200, Jan Kara wrote:
> On Mon 09-05-11 16:03:18, Darrick J. Wong wrote:
> > I am still chasing down what exactly is broken in ext3. data=writeback mode
> > passes with no failures. data=ordered, however, does not pass; my current
> > suspicion is that jbd is calling submit_bh on data buffers but doesn't call
> > page_mkclean to kick the userspace programs off the page before writing it.
> Yes, ext3 in data=ordered mode writes pages from
> journal_commit_transaction() via submit_bh() without clearing page dirty
> bits thus page_mkclean() is not called for these pages. Frankly, do you
> really want to bother with adding support for ext2 and ext3? People can use
> ext4 as a fs driver when they want to start using blk-integrity support.
> Especially ext2 patch looks really painful and just from a quick look I can
> see code e.g. in fs/ext2/namei.c which isn't handled by your patch yet.

Yeah, I agree that ext2 is ugly and ext3/jbd might be more painful. Are there
any other code that wants stable pages that's already running with ext3? In
this months-long discussion I've heard that encryption and raid also like
stable pages during writes. Have those users been broken this whole time, or
have they been stabilizing pages themselves?

I suppose we can cross the "ext3 fails horribly on DIF" bridge when someone
complains about it. Possibly we could try to steer them to btrfs.

--D
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