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

[Matthew Wilcox]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 08:21:59AM -0600, Goldwyn Rodrigues wrote:
> 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

But why?  A completeness fetish?  I don't understand why you decided
to do this work.

> 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.

If you're still thinking in terms of pages, you're doing DAX wrong.
DAX should work without a struct page.