Re: [PATCH 2/3] mm, dax, pmem: Introduce dev_pagemap_failure()

[Dan Williams]

On Fri, Mar 19, 2021 at 6:47 PM Dave Chinner <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[..]
> > Now I'm trying to reconcile the fact that platform
> > poison handling will hit memory_failure() first and may not
> > immediately reach the driver, if ever (see the perennially awkward
> > firmware-first-mode error handling: ghes_handle_memory_failure()) . So
> > even if the ->memory_failure(dev...) up call exists there is no
> > guarantee it can get called for all poison before the memory_failure()
> > down call happens. Which means regardless of whether
> > ->memory_failure(dev...) exists memory_failure() needs to be able to
> > do the right thing.
>
> I don't see how a poor implementation of memory_failure in a driver
> or hardware is even remotely relevant to the interface used to
> notify the filesystem of a media or device failure. It sounds like
> you are trying to use memory_failure() for something it was never
> intended to support and that there's a bunch of driver and
> infrastructure work needed to make it work how you want it to work.
> And even then it may not work the way we want it to work....
>
> > Combine that with the fact that new buses like CXL might be configured
> > in "poison on decode error" mode which means that a memory_failure()
> > storm can happen regardless of whether the driver initiates it
> > programatically.
>
> Straw man argument.
>
> "We can't make this interface a ranged notification because the
> hardware might only be able to do page-by-page notification."

No, it's "we can't make this interface notify the filesytem that
sectors have failed before the memory_failure() (ranged or not) has
communicated that pfns have failed."

memory_failure() today is the first and sometimes only interface that
learns of pfn failures.

>
> You can do page-by-page notification with a range based interface.
> We are talking about how to efficiently and reliably inform the
> filesystem that a range of a device is no longer accessible and so
> it needs to revoke all mappings over that range of it's address
> space. That does not need to be a single page at a time interface.
>
> If your hardware is configured to do stupid things, then that is not
> the fault of the software interface used to communicate faults up
> the stack, nor is it something that the notfication interface should
> try to fix or mitigate.....
>
> > How about a mechanism to optionally let a filesystem take over memory
> > failure handling for a range of pfns that the memory_failure() can
> > consult to fail ranges at a time rather than one by one? So a new
> > 'struct dax_operations' op (void) (*memory_failure_register(struct
> > dax_device *, void *data). Where any agent that claims a dax_dev can
> > register to take over memory_failure() handling for any event that
> > happens in that range. This would be routed through device-mapper like
> > any other 'struct dax_operations' op. I think that meets your
> > requirement to get notifications of all the events you want to handle,
> > but still allows memory_failure() to be the last resort for everything
> > that has not opted into this error handling.
>
> Which is basically the same as the proposed ->corrupted_range stack,
> except it doesn't map the pfns back to LBA addresses the filesystem
> needs to make sense of the failure.
>
> fs-dax filesystems have no clue what pfns are, or how to translate
> them to LBAs in their block device address space that the map
> everything to. The fs-dax infrastructure asks the filesystem for
> bdev/sector based mappings, and internally converts them to pfns by
> a combination of bdev and daxdev callouts. Hence fs-dax filesystems
> never see nor interpret pfns at all.  Nor do they have the
> capability to convert a PFN to a LBA address. And neither the
> underlying block device nor the associated DAX device provide a
> method for doing this reverse mapping translation.

True.

>
> So if we have an interface that hands a {daxdev,PFN,len} tuple to
> the filesystem, exactly what is the filesystem supposed to do with
> it? How do we turn that back into a {bdev,sector,len} tuple so we
> can do reverse mapping lookups to find the filesystem objects that
> allocated within the notified range?
>
> I'll point out again that these address space translations were
> something that the ->corrupted_range callbacks handled directly - no
> layer in the stack was handed a range that it didn't know how to map
> to it's own internal structures. By the time it got to the
> filesystem, it was a {bdev,sector,len} tuple, and the filesystem
> could feed that directly to it's reverse mapping lookups....
>
> Maybe I'm missing something magical about ->memory_failure that does
> all this translation for us, but I don't see it in this patchset. I
> just don't see how this proposed interface is a usable at the
> filesystem level as it stands.

So then it's not the filesystem that needs to register for
memory_failure() it's the driver in order to translate the failed LBAs
up the stack. However, memory_failure() still needs to make sure that
the pfns are unmapped regardless of any LBA notification after the
fact. So memory_failure() would still need to gain a range based
failure mode that optionally coordinates with a driver that can try to
head off sub-optimal memory_failure() default behavior.

Something like:

memory_failure_range()
    for_each_range_owner() {
        handled = notify_range_owner()
        if (!handled)
            do_fail_each_pfn()
    }

...then in the pmem driver.

pmem_pfn_range_failure_handler()
    lba_range_failure_notifier()

Then each stacking block device registers for the lba_notifier from
the next block device in the stack.