Re: [PATCH RFC 00/10] RDMA/FS DAX truncate proposal

[Ira Weiny]

On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 08:27:55AM -0700, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 10:25:55AM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
> > e.g. Process A has an exclusive layout lease on file F. It does an
> > IO to file F. The filesystem IO path checks that Process A owns the
> > lease on the file and so skips straight through layout breaking
> > because it owns the lease and is allowed to modify the layout. It
> > then takes the inode metadata locks to allocate new space and write
> > new data.
> > 
> > Process B now tries to write to file F. The FS checks whether
> > Process B owns a layout lease on file F. It doesn't, so then it
> > tries to break the layout lease so the IO can proceed. The layout
> > breaking code sees that process A has an exclusive layout lease
> > granted, and so returns -ETXTBSY to process B - it is not allowed to
> > break the lease and so the IO fails with -ETXTBSY.
> 
> This description doesn't match the behaviour that RDMA wants either.
> Even if Process A has a lease on the file, an IO from Process A which
> results in blocks being freed from the file is going to result in the
> RDMA device being able to write to blocks which are now freed (and
> potentially reallocated to another file).

I don't understand why this would not work for RDMA?  As long as the layout
does not change the page pins can remain in place.

Ira