linux-kernel - Re: [RFC][PATCH] block: Isolate the buffer cache in it's own mappings.

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Date:	Sun, 21 Oct 2007 15:36:24 +1000
From:	Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@...oo.com.au>
To:	"Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@...ssion.com>
Cc:	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Chris Mason <chris.mason@...cle.com>,
	Christian Borntraeger <borntraeger@...ibm.com>,
	linux-mm@...ck.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@...ibm.com>,
	"Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@....edu>, stable@...nel.org
Subject: Re: [RFC][PATCH] block: Isolate the buffer cache in it's own mappings.

On Sunday 21 October 2007 14:53, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@...oo.com.au> writes:
> > On Saturday 20 October 2007 07:27, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> >> Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org> writes:
> >> > I don't think we little angels want to tread here.  There are so many
> >> > weirdo things out there which will break if we bust the coherence
> >> > between the fs and /dev/hda1.
> >>
> >> We broke coherence between the fs and /dev/hda1 when we introduced
> >> the page cache years ago,
> >
> > Not for metadata. And I wouldn't expect many filesystem analysis
> > tools to care about data.
>
> Well tools like dump certainly weren't happy when we made the change.

Doesn't that give you any suspicion that other tools mightn't
be happy if we make this change, then?

> >> and weird hacky cases like
> >> unmap_underlying_metadata don't change that.
> >
> > unmap_underlying_metadata isn't about raw block device access at
> > all, though (if you write to the filesystem via the blockdevice
> > when it isn't expecting it, it's going to blow up regardless).
>
> Well my goal with separating things is so that we could decouple two
> pieces of code that have different usage scenarios, and where
> supporting both scenarios simultaneously appears to me to needlessly
> complicate the code.
>
> Added to that we could then tune the two pieces of code for their
> different users.

I don't see too much complication from it. If we can actually
simplify things or make useful tuning, maybe it will be worth
doing.

> >> Currently only
> >> metadata is more or less in sync with the contents of /dev/hda1.
> >
> > It either is or it isn't, right? And it is, isn't it? (at least
> > for the common filesystems).
>
> ext2 doesn't store directories in the buffer cache.

Oh that's what you mean. OK, agreed there. But for the filesystems
and types of metadata that can now expect to have coherency, doing
this will break that expectation.

Again, I have no opinions either way on whether we should do that
in the long run. But doing it as a kneejerk response to braindead
rd.c code is wrong because of what *might* go wrong and we don't
know about.

> Journaling filesystems and filesystems that do ordered writes
> game the buffer cache.  Putting in data that should not yet
> be written to disk.  That gaming is where reiserfs goes BUG
> and where JBD moves the dirty bit to a different dirty bit.

Filesystems really want better control of writeback, I think.
This isn't really a consequence of the unified blockdev pagecache
/ metadata buffer cache, it is just that most of the important
things they do are with metadata.

If they have their own metadata inode, then they'll need to game
the cache for it, or the writeback code for that inode somehow
too.

> So as far as I can tell what is in the buffer cache is not really
> in sync with what should be on disk at any given movement except
> when everything is clean.

Naturally. It is a writeback cache.

> My suspicion is that actually reading from disk is likely to
> give a more coherent view of things.  Because there at least
> we have the writes as they are expected to be seen by fsck
> to recover the data, and a snapshot there should at least
> be recoverable.  Whereas a snapshot provides not such guarantees.

ext3 fsck I don't think is supposed to be run under a read/write
filesystem, so it's going to explode if you do that regardless.
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