Re: [External] Re: [RFC PATCH v1 0/6] use mm to manage NVDIMM (pmem) zone
From: Matthew Wilcox
Date: Mon May 07 2018 - 23:10:14 EST
On Tue, May 08, 2018 at 02:59:40AM +0000, Huaisheng HS1 Ye wrote:
> Currently in our mind, an ideal use scenario is that, we put all page caches to
> zone_nvm, without any doubt, page cache is an efficient and common cache
> implement, but it has a disadvantage that all dirty data within it would has risk
> to be missed by power failure or system crash. If we put all page caches to NVDIMMs,
> all dirty data will be safe.
That's a common misconception. Some dirty data will still be in the
CPU caches. Are you planning on building servers which have enough
capacitance to allow the CPU to flush all dirty data from LLC to NV-DIMM?
Then there's the problem of reconnecting the page cache (which is
pointed to by ephemeral data structures like inodes and dentries) to
the new inodes.
And then you have to convince customers that what you're doing is safe
enough for them to trust it ;-)