Re: [RFC PATCH V2 01/12] fs/stat: Define DAX statx attribute

[Dan Williams]

On Wed, Jan 15, 2020 at 9:39 PM Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[..]
> >         attempts to minimize software cache effects for both I/O and
> >         memory mappings of this file.  It requires a file system which
> >         has been configured to support DAX.
> >
> >         DAX generally assumes all accesses are via cpu load / store
> >         instructions which can minimize overhead for small accesses, but
> >         may adversely affect cpu utilization for large transfers.
> >
> >         File I/O is done directly to/from user-space buffers and memory
> >         mapped I/O may be performed with direct memory mappings that
> >         bypass kernel page cache.
> >
> >         While the DAX property tends to result in data being transferred
> >         synchronously, it does not give the same guarantees of
> >         synchronous I/O where data and the necessary metadata are
> >         transferred together.
>
> (I'm frankly not sure that synchronous I/O actually guarantees that the
> metadata has hit stable storage...)

Oh? That text was motivated by the open(2) man page description of O_SYNC.