linux-kernel - Re: [dm-devel] [PATCH v1 0/5] dm: dm-user: New target that proxies BIOs to userspace

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Date:   Thu, 10 Dec 2020 12:03:21 -0500
From:   Josef Bacik <josef@...icpanda.com>
To:     Bart Van Assche <bvanassche@....org>,
        Palmer Dabbelt <palmer@...belt.com>,
        Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org>
Cc:     snitzer@...hat.com, corbet@....net, kernel-team@...roid.com,
        linux-doc@...r.kernel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-raid@...r.kernel.org, song@...nel.org, dm-devel@...hat.com,
        linux-kselftest@...r.kernel.org, shuah@...nel.org, agk@...hat.com,
        Mike Christie <michael.christie@...cle.com>
Subject: Re: [dm-devel] [PATCH v1 0/5] dm: dm-user: New target that proxies
 BIOs to userspace

On 12/9/20 10:38 PM, Bart Van Assche wrote:
> On 12/7/20 10:55 AM, Palmer Dabbelt wrote:
>> All in all, I've found it a bit hard to figure out what sort of interest
>> people
>> have in dm-user: when I bring this up I seem to run into people who've done
>> similar things before and are vaguely interested, but certainly nobody is
>> chomping at the bit.  I'm sending it out in this early state to try and
>> figure
>> out if it's interesting enough to keep going.
> 
> Cc-ing Josef and Mike since their nbd contributions make me wonder
> whether this new driver could be useful to their use cases?
> 

Sorry gmail+imap sucks and I can't get my email client to get at the original 
thread.  However here is my take.

1) The advantages of using dm-user of NBD that you listed aren't actually 
problems for NBD.  We have NBD working in production where you can hand off the 
sockets for the server without ending in timeouts, it was actually the main 
reason we wrote our own server so we could use the FD transfer stuff to restart 
the server without impacting any clients that had the device in use.

2) The extra copy is a big deal, in fact we already have too many copies in our 
existing NBD setup and are actively looking for ways to avoid those.

Don't take this as I don't think dm-user is a good idea, but I think at the very 
least it should start with the very best we have to offer, starting with as few 
copies as possible.

If you are using it currently in production then cool, there's clearly a usecase 
for it.  Personally as I get older and grouchier I want less things in the 
kernel, so if this enables us to eventually do everything NBD related in 
userspace with no performance drop then I'd be down.  I don't think you need to 
make that your primary goal, but at least polishing this up so it could 
potentially be abused in the future would make it more compelling for merging. 
Thanks,

Josef