RE: [PATCH 00/13] dax, pmem: move cpu cache maintenance to libnvdimm

From: Matthew Wilcox
Date: Sun Jan 22 2017 - 13:19:37 EST


From: Christoph Hellwig [mailto:hch@xxxxxx]
> On Sun, Jan 22, 2017 at 03:43:09PM +0000, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > In the case of a network filesystem being used to communicate with
> > a different VM on the same physical machine, there is no backing
> > device, just a network protocol.
>
> Again, do you mean block device? For a filesystem that does not do any
> pagecache writeback we already don't need a backing device, so I don't
> really see an issue there to start with.

No, I mean a network filesystem like 9p or cifs or nfs. If the memcpy is supposed to be performed by the backing device and there is no backing device, then it's going to need to be done by the network filesystem.

(Also, the network filesystem might have a command, like RDMA has/will have, to ensure that the write has reached persistence)