linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH v4 6/9] f2fs: don't allow DIO reads but not DIO writes

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Message-ID: <Yt7dCcG0ns85QqJe@sol.localdomain>
Date:   Mon, 25 Jul 2022 11:12:25 -0700
From:   Eric Biggers <ebiggers@...nel.org>
To:     Jaegeuk Kim <jaegeuk@...nel.org>
Cc:     linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org, linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-f2fs-devel@...ts.sourceforge.net, linux-xfs@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-api@...r.kernel.org, linux-fscrypt@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-block@...r.kernel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
        Keith Busch <kbusch@...nel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v4 6/9] f2fs: don't allow DIO reads but not DIO writes

On Sat, Jul 23, 2022 at 07:01:59PM -0700, Jaegeuk Kim wrote:
> On 07/22, Eric Biggers wrote:
> > From: Eric Biggers <ebiggers@...gle.com>
> > 
> > Currently, if an f2fs filesystem is mounted with the mode=lfs and
> > io_bits mount options, DIO reads are allowed but DIO writes are not.
> > Allowing DIO reads but not DIO writes is an unusual restriction, which
> > is likely to be surprising to applications, namely any application that
> > both reads and writes from a file (using O_DIRECT).  This behavior is
> > also incompatible with the proposed STATX_DIOALIGN extension to statx.
> > Given this, let's drop the support for DIO reads in this configuration.
> 
> IIRC, we allowed DIO reads since applications complained a lower performance.
> So, I'm afraid this change will make another confusion to users. Could
> you please apply the new bahavior only for STATX_DIOALIGN?
> 

Well, the issue is that the proposed STATX_DIOALIGN fields cannot represent this
weird case where DIO reads are allowed but not DIO writes.  So the question is
whether this case actually matters, in which case we should make STATX_DIOALIGN
distinguish between DIO reads and DIO writes, or whether it's some odd edge case
that doesn't really matter, in which case we could just fix it or make
STATX_DIOALIGN report that DIO is unsupported.  I was hoping that you had some
insight here.  What sort of applications want DIO reads but not DIO writes?
Is this common at all?

- Eric