linux-kernel - Re: fall back from direct to buffered I/O when stable writes are required

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Message-ID: <20251029161447.GG3356773@frogsfrogsfrogs>
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2025 09:14:47 -0700
From: "Darrick J. Wong" <djwong@...nel.org>
To: Bart Van Assche <bart.vanassche@...il.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@....de>, Carlos Maiolino <cem@...nel.org>,
	Christian Brauner <brauner@...nel.org>, Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>,
	"Martin K. Petersen" <martin.petersen@...cle.com>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-xfs@...r.kernel.org,
	linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org, linux-raid@...r.kernel.org,
	linux-block@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: fall back from direct to buffered I/O when stable writes are
 required

On Wed, Oct 29, 2025 at 08:58:52AM -0700, Bart Van Assche wrote:
> On 10/29/25 12:15 AM, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > we've had a long standing issue that direct I/O to and from devices that
> > require stable writes can corrupt data because the user memory can be
> > modified while in flight.  This series tries to address this by falling
> > back to uncached buffered I/O.  Given that this requires an extra copy it
> > is usually going to be a slow down, especially for very high bandwith
> > use cases, so I'm not exactly happy about.
> > 
> > I suspect we need a way to opt out of this for applications that know
> > what they are doing, and I can think of a few ways to do that:
> > 
> > 1a) Allow a mount option to override the behavior
> > 
> > 	This allows the sysadmin to get back to the previous state.
> > 	This is fairly easy to implement, but the scope might be to wide.

/me dislikes mount options because getting rid of them is hard.

> > 1b) Sysfs attribute
> > 
> > 	Same as above.  Slightly easier to modify, but a more unusual
> > 	interface.
> > 
> > 2) Have a per-inode attribute
> > 
> > 	Allows to set it on a specific file.  Would require an on-disk
> > 	format change for the usual attr options.
> > 
> > 3) Have a fcntl or similar to allow an application to override it
> > 
> > 	Fine granularity.  Requires application change.  We might not
> > 	allow any application to force this as it could be used to inject
> > 	corruption.
> > 
> > In other words, they are all kinda horrible.

Yeah, I don't like the choices either.  Bart's prctl sounds the least
annoying but even then I still don't like "I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING!!"
flags.

> Hi Christoph,
> 
> Has the opposite been considered: only fall back to buffered I/O for buggy
> software that modifies direct I/O buffers before I/O has
> completed?

How would xfs detect that?  For all we know the dio buffer is actually a
piece of device memory or something, and some hardware changed the
memory without the kernel knowing that.  Later on the raid scrub fails a
parity check and it's far too late to do anything about it.

--D

> Regarding selecting the direct I/O behavior for a process, how about
> introducing a new prctl() flag and introducing a new command-line
> utility that follows the style of ionice and sets the new flag before
> any code runs in the started process?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Bart.
>