linux-ext4 - Re: [PATCH 3/8] nowait aio: return if direct write will trigger writeback

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Date:   Thu, 2 Mar 2017 16:22:45 +0100
From:   Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>
To:     Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>
Cc:     Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>, Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org>,
        Goldwyn Rodrigues <rgoldwyn@...e.de>, jack@...e.com,
        linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org, linux-block@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-btrfs@...r.kernel.org, linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-xfs@...r.kernel.org, Goldwyn Rodrigues <rgoldwyn@...e.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 3/8] nowait aio: return if direct write will trigger
 writeback

On Thu 02-03-17 06:12:45, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 02, 2017 at 11:38:45AM +0100, Jan Kara wrote:
> > On Wed 01-03-17 07:38:57, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > > On Tue, Feb 28, 2017 at 07:46:06PM -0800, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > > > But what's going to kick these pages out of cache?  Shouldn't we rather
> > > > find the pages, kick them out if clean, start writeback if not, and *then*
> > > > return -EAGAIN?
> > > 
> > > As pointed out in the last round of these patches I think we really
> > > need to pass a flags argument to filemap_write_and_wait_range to
> > > communicate the non-blocking nature and only return -EAGAIN if we'd
> > > block.  As a bonus that can indeed start to kick the pages out.
> > 
> > Aren't flags to filemap_write_and_wait_range() unnecessary complication?
> > Realistically, most users wanting performance from AIO DIO so badly that
> > they bother with this API won't have any pages to write / evict. If they do
> > by some bad accident, they can fall back to standard "blocking" AIO DIO.
> > So I don't see much value in teaching filemap_write_and_wait_range() about
> > a non-blocking mode...
> 
> That lets me execute a DoS against a user using this API.  All I have
> to do is open the file they're using read-only and read a byte from it.
> Page goes into page-cache, and they'll only get -EAGAIN from calling
> this syscall until the page ages out.

It will not be a DoS. This non-blocking AIO can always return EAGAIN when
it feels like it and the caller is required to fall back to a blocking
version in that case if he wants to guarantee forward progress. It is just
a performance optimization which allows user (database) to submit IO from a
computation thread instead of having to offload it to an IO thread...

> Also, I don't understand why this is a flag.  Isn't the point of AIO to
> be non-blocking?  Why isn't this just a change to how we do AIO?

Because this is an API change and the caller has to implement some handling
to guarantee a forward progress of non-blocking IO...

								Honza
-- 
Jan Kara <jack@...e.com>
SUSE Labs, CR