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

[Darrick J. Wong]

On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 11:42:55AM +0200, Jan Kara wrote:
> On Wed 11-05-11 11:19:01, Darrick J. Wong wrote:
> > 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 believe part of them has been broken (e.g. raid) and part of them do
> copy-out so they were OK.

A future step might be to undo all these homegrown copy-outs?

> > 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.
>   Well, btrfs might be a bit too advantageous for production servers but
> ext4 would be definitely viable for them.

Are there any distros that are going straight from ext3 to btrfs?

--D
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