Re: [PATCH v2 00/10] fsdax,xfs: Add reflink&dedupe support for fsdax

[Goldwyn Rodrigues]

On 13:02 10/03, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 07:30:41AM -0500, Neal Gompa wrote:
> > Forgive my ignorance, but is there a reason why this isn't wired up to
> > Btrfs at the same time? It seems weird to me that adding a feature
> 
> btrfs doesn't support DAX.  only ext2, ext4, XFS and FUSE have DAX support.
> 
> If you think about it, btrfs and DAX are diametrically opposite things.
> DAX is about giving raw access to the hardware.  btrfs is about offering
> extra value (RAID, checksums, ...), none of which can be done if the
> filesystem isn't in the read/write path.
> 
> That's why there's no DAX support in btrfs.  If you want DAX, you have
> to give up all the features you like in btrfs.  So you may as well use
> a different filesystem.

DAX on btrfs has been attempted[1]. Of course, we could not
have checksums or multi-device with it. However, got stuck on
associating a shared extent on the same page mapping: basically the
TODO above dax_associate_entry().

Shiyang has proposed a way to disassociate existing mapping, but I
don't think that is the best solution. DAX for CoW will not work until
we have a way of mapping a page to multiple inodes (page->mapping),
which will convert a 1-N inode-page mapping to M-N inode-page mapping.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-btrfs/20190429172649.8288-1-rgoldwyn@xxxxxxx/

-- 
Goldwyn