Date:   Tue, 21 Nov 2017 16:05:06 -0800
From:   "Darrick J. Wong" <darrick.wong@...cle.com>
To:     Dave Chinner <david@...morbit.com>
Cc:     Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>,
        xfs <linux-xfs@...r.kernel.org>,
        Ilya Dryomov <idryomov@...il.com>,
        linux-fsdevel <linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Brian Foster <bfoster@...hat.com>,
        holger@...lied-asynchrony.com,
        linux-ext4 <linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org>,
        linux-btrfs <linux-btrfs@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] iomap: report collisions between directio and
 buffered writes to userspace

On Wed, Nov 22, 2017 at 09:28:06AM +1100, Dave Chinner wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 04:52:53AM -0800, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 05:48:15PM +1100, Dave Chinner wrote:
> > > On Mon, Nov 20, 2017 at 08:32:40PM -0800, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > > > On Mon, Nov 20, 2017 at 05:37:53PM -0800, Darrick J. Wong wrote:
> > > > > On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 09:27:49AM +1100, Dave Chinner wrote:
> > > > > > First thing I noticed was that "xa" as a prefix is already quite
> > > > > > widely used in XFS - it's shorthand for "XFS AIL". Indeed, xa_lock
> > > >
> > > > The X stands for 'eXpandable' or 'eXtending'.  I really don't want to
> > > > use more than a two-letter acronym for whatever the XArray ends up being
> > > > called.  One of the problems with the radix tree is that everything has
> > > > that 11-character 'radix_tree_' prefix; just replacing that with 'xa_'
> > > > makes a huge improvement to readability.
> > > 
> > > Yeah, understood. That's why
> > > we have very little clear
> > > prefix namespace left.... :/
> > > 
> > > [ somedays I write something that looks sorta like a haiku, and from
> > > that point on everything just starts falling out of my brain that
> > > way. I blame Eric for this today! :P ]
> > 
> > When the namespace is
> > tight we must consider the
> > competing users.
> > 
> > The earliest us'r
> > has a claim to a prefix
> > we are used to it.
> > 
> > Also a more wide-
> > spread user has a claim to
> > a shorter prefix.
> > 
> > Would you mind changing
> > your prefix to one only
> > one letter longer?
> 
> We can do something
> like that, though Darrick has the
> final say in it.

Keep this up and soon
I'll require patch changelogs
Written in Haiku. :P

(j/k)

Everyone in the US, have a happy Thanksgiving!

--D

> > ... ok, I give up ;-)
> 
> Top marks for effort :)
> 
> > All your current usage of the xa_ prefix looks somewhat like this:
> > 
> > fs/xfs/xfs_trans_ail.c: spin_lock(&ailp->xa_lock);
> > 
> > with honourable mentions to:
> > fs/xfs/xfs_log.c:	spin_lock(&mp->m_ail->xa_lock);
> > 
> > Would you mind if I bolt a patch on to the front of the series called
> > something like "free up xa_ namespace" that renamed your xa_* to ail_*?
> > There are no uses of the 'ail_' prefix in the kernel today.
> > 
> > I don't think that
> > 	spin_lock(&ailp->ail_lock);
> > loses any readability.
> 
> Not sure that's going to work - there's an "xa_ail" member for the
> AIL list head. That would now read in places:
> 
> 	if (list_empty(&ailp->ail_ail))
> 
> I'd be inclined to just drop the "xa_" prefix from the XFS
> structure.  There is no information loss by removing the prefix in
> the XFS code because the pointer name tells us what structure it is
> pointing at.
> 
> > 
> > By the way, what does AIL stand for?  It'd be nice if it were spelled out
> > in at least one of the header files, maybe fs/xfs/xfs_trans_priv.h?
> 
> Active Item List. See the section "Tracking Changes" in
> Documentation/filesystems/xfs-delayed-logging-design.txt for the
> full rundown, but in short:
> 
> "The log item is already used to track the log items that have been
> written to the log but not yet written to disk. Such log items are
> considered "active" and as such are stored in the Active Item List
> (AIL) which is a LSN-ordered double linked list. Items are inserted
> into this list during log buffer IO completion, after which they are
> unpinned and can be written to disk."
> 
> The lack of comments describing the AIL is historic - it's never
> been documented in the code, nor has the whole relogging concept it
> implements. I wrote the document above when introducing the CIL
> (Commited Item List) because almost no-one actively working on XFS
> understood how the whole journalling subsystem worked in any detail.
> 
> > > Zoetrope Array.
> > > Labyrinth of illusion.
> > > Structure never ends.
> > 
> > Thank you for making me look up zoetrope ;-)
> 
> My pleasure :)
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Dave.
> -- 
> Dave Chinner
> david@...morbit.com
> --
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