Re: [EXT] Re: [PATCH v2 00/22] add Object Storage Media Pool (mpool)

[Dan Williams]

On Wed, Oct 21, 2020 at 7:24 AM Mike Snitzer <snitzer@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hey Dan,
>
> On Fri, Oct 16, 2020 at 6:38 PM Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, Oct 16, 2020 at 2:59 PM Nabeel Meeramohideen Mohamed
> > (nmeeramohide) <nmeeramohide@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > > (5) Representing an mpool as a /dev/mpool/<mpool-name> device file provides a
> > > convenient mechanism for controlling access to and managing the multiple storage
> > > volumes, and in the future pmem devices, that may comprise an logical mpool.
> >
> > Christoph and I have talked about replacing the pmem driver's
> > dependence on device-mapper for pooling.
>
> Was this discussion done publicly or private?  If public please share
> a pointer to the thread.
>
> I'd really like to understand the problem statement that is leading to
> pursuing a pmem native alternative to existing DM.
>

IIRC it was during the hallway track at a conference. Some of the
concern is the flexibility to carve physical address space but not
attach a block-device in front of it, and allow pmem/dax-capable
filesystems to mount on something other than a block-device.

DM does fit the bill for block-device concatenation and striping, but
there's some pressure to have a level of provisioning beneath that.

The device-dax facility has already started to grow some physical
address space partitioning capabilities this cycle, see 60e93dc097f7
device-dax: add dis-contiguous resource support, and the question
becomes when / if that support needs to extend across regions is DM
the right tool for that?