Re: [LSF/MM TOPIC] Discuss least bad options for resolving longterm-GUP usage by RDMA

[Dan Williams]

On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 10:40 AM Matthew Wilcox <willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 11:26:49AM -0700, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> > On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 10:19:22AM -0800, Ira Weiny wrote:
> > > What if user space then writes to the end of the file with a regular write?
> > > Does that write end up at the point they truncated to or off the end of the
> > > mmaped area (old length)?
> >
> > IIRC it depends how the user does the write..
> >
> > pwrite() with a given offset will write to that offset, re-extending
> > the file if needed
> >
> > A file opened with O_APPEND and a write done with write() should
> > append to the new end
> >
> > A normal file with a normal write should write to the FD's current
> > seek pointer.
> >
> > I'm not sure what happens if you write via mmap/msync.
> >
> > RDMA is similar to pwrite() and mmap.
>
> A pertinent point that you didn't mention is that ftruncate() does not change
> the file offset.  So there's no user-visible change in behaviour.

...but there is. The blocks you thought you freed, especially if the
system was under -ENOSPC pressure, won't actually be free after the
successful ftruncate().