linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH v6 11/13] xfs: add xfs_file_dio_write

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Message-ID: <20250318084641.GC19274@lst.de>
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2025 09:46:41 +0100
From: Christoph Hellwig <hch@....de>
To: John Garry <john.g.garry@...cle.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@....de>, brauner@...nel.org, djwong@...nel.org,
	cem@...nel.org, dchinner@...hat.com, linux-xfs@...r.kernel.org,
	linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	ojaswin@...ux.ibm.com, ritesh.list@...il.com,
	martin.petersen@...cle.com, tytso@....edu,
	linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH v6 11/13] xfs: add xfs_file_dio_write_atomic()

On Tue, Mar 18, 2025 at 08:42:36AM +0000, John Garry wrote:
>> I see that this is what's done in the current series now.  But that feels
>> very wrong.  Why do you want to deprive the user of this nice and useful
>> code if they don't have the right hardware? 
>
> I don't think it's fair to say that we deprive the user - so far we just 
> don't and nobody has asked for atomics without HW support.

You're still keeping this nice functionality from the users..

>
>> Why do we limit us to the
>> hardware supported size when we support more in software? 
>
> As I see, HW offload gives fast and predictable performance.
>
> The COW method is just a (slow) fallback is when HW offload is not possible.
>
> If we want to allow the user to avail of atomics greater than the mounted 
> bdev, then we should have a method to tell the user of the optimised 
> threshold. They could read the bdev atomic limits and infer this, but that 
> is not a good user experience.

Yes, there should be an interface to expose that.  But even without
the hardware acceleration a guaranteed untorn write is a really nice
feature to have.