Re: [RFC PATCH 2/2] mm, fs: daxfile, an interface for byte-addressable updates to pmem

From: Christoph Hellwig
Date: Sun Jun 18 2017 - 04:19:16 EST


On Sat, Jun 17, 2017 at 08:15:05PM -0700, Dan Williams wrote:
> The hang up is that it requires per-fs enabling as it needs to be
> careful to manage mmap_sem vs fs journal locks for example. I know the
> in-development NOVA [1] filesystem is planning to support this out of
> the gate. ext4 would be open to implementing it, but I think xfs is
> cold on the idea. Christoph originally proposed it here [2], before
> Dave went on to propose immutable semantics.
>
> [1]: https://github.com/NVSL/NOVA
> [2]: https://lists.01.org/pipermail/linux-nvdimm/2016-February/004609.html

And I stand to that statement. Let's get DAX stable first, and
properly cleaned up (e.g. follow on work with separating it entirely
from the block device). Then think hard about how most of the
persistent memory technologies actually work, including the point that
for a lot of workloads page cache will be required at least on the
write side. And then come up with actual real use cases and we can
look into it.

And stop trying to shoe-horn crap like this in.