Re: [PATCH] filesystem-dax: Disable PMD support

[Dan Williams]

On Thu, Jun 27, 2019 at 9:06 AM Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Jun 27, 2019 at 5:34 AM Matthew Wilcox <willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 05:15:45PM -0700, Dan Williams wrote:
> > > Ever since the conversion of DAX to the Xarray a RocksDB benchmark has
> > > been encountering intermittent lockups. The backtraces always include
> > > the filesystem-DAX PMD path, multi-order entries have been a source of
> > > bugs in the past, and disabling the PMD path allows a test that fails in
> > > minutes to run for an hour.
> >
> > On May 4th, I asked you:
> >
> > Since this is provoked by a fatal signal, it must have something to do
> > with a killable or interruptible sleep.  There's only one of those in the
> > DAX code; fatal_signal_pending() in dax_iomap_actor().  Does rocksdb do
> > I/O with write() or through a writable mmap()?  I'd like to know before
> > I chase too far down this fault tree analysis.
>
> RocksDB in this case is using write() for writes and mmap() for reads.

It's not clear to me that a fatal signal is a component of the failure
as much as it's the way to detect that the benchmark has indeed locked
up.