linux-kernel - Re: Upcoming: fscache rewrite

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Date:   Thu, 30 Jul 2020 13:36:14 +0100
From:   David Howells <dhowells@...hat.com>
To:     Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>
Cc:     dhowells@...hat.com, torvalds@...ux-foundation.org,
        Alexander Viro <viro@...iv.linux.org.uk>,
        Christoph Hellwig <hch@....de>,
        Jeff Layton <jlayton@...hat.com>,
        Dave Wysochanski <dwysocha@...hat.com>,
        Trond Myklebust <trondmy@...merspace.com>,
        Anna Schumaker <anna.schumaker@...app.com>,
        Steve French <sfrench@...ba.org>,
        Eric Van Hensbergen <ericvh@...il.com>,
        linux-cachefs@...hat.com, linux-afs@...ts.infradead.org,
        linux-nfs@...r.kernel.org, linux-cifs@...r.kernel.org,
        ceph-devel@...r.kernel.org, v9fs-developer@...ts.sourceforge.net,
        linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Upcoming: fscache rewrite

Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org> wrote:

> I suspect you don't need to call find_get_pages_contig().  If you look
> at __readahead_batch() in pagemap.h, it does basically what you want
> (other than being wrapped up inside the readahead iterator).  You require
> the pages already be pinned in the xarray, so there's no need for the
> page_cache_get_speculative() dance that find_get_pages_contig) does,
> nor the check for xa_is_value().

I'll have a look at that.

> My main concern with your patchset is that it introduces a new page flag

Technically, the flag already exists - I'm just using it for something
different than the old fscache code used it for.

> to sleep on which basically means "I am writing this page to the fscache".
> I don't understand why you need it; you've elevated the refcount on
> the pages so they're not going to get reused for another purpose.
> All it does (as far as I can tell) is make a task calling truncate()
> wait for the page to finish being written to cache, which isn't actually
> necessary.

It's also used to prevent starting overlapping async DIO writes to the cache.

See fscache_read_done(), where it's set to cover writing what we've just read
from the server to the cache, and afs_write_back_from_locked_page(), where
it's set to cover writing the data to be written back to the cache.

David