Re: f2fs async buffered write patch

From: Yangtao Li
Date: Mon Jun 26 2023 - 03:32:14 EST


+cc willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx


On 2023/6/20 4:43, Jens Axboe wrote:

Hi,

I came across this patch in a news posting:

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jaegeuk/f2fs.git/commit/?h=dev&id=d618126911829523e35a61f4a5a4ad159b1b2c8d

which has me a bit worried. As far as I can tell, all that patch does is
set FMODE_BUF_WASYNC, and then just hope that the lower layers handle
the rest?

What happens if iocb->ki_flags & IOCB_NOWAIT is true, and now we do:

generic_perform_write(iocb, from)
...
->write_begin() <- does this block?

Most file systems have not been changed to the iomap method,

and the generic_perform_write method is still used. So it seems

 reasonable to make IOCB_NOWAIT be handled correctly by the

 generic_perform_write function. This means that we need to modify

 several places mentioned by Jens in the generic_perform_write function,

 and need to pass AOP_FLAG_xxx or iocb into write_begin.


I noticed that Matthew Wilcox removed the flags parameter in write_begin

in a previous commit, maybe we can add it back?


Thx

...
->write_end() <- or this one?
...
balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited() <- this one surely does...

If you look just one level down the latter to
balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited_flags(), you'll even see the 'flags'
argument documented there.

This looks pretty haphazard and cannot possibly work as-is, so please
get this reverted until f2fs is converted to iomap, or IOCB_NOWAIT is
handled by generic_perform_write() and below.