Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2016 16:54:54 -0600
From: Stephen Bates <sbates@raithlin.com>
To: Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>
Cc: "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        "linux-nvdimm@lists.01.org" <linux-nvdimm@ml01.01.org>,
        linux-rdma@vger.kernel.org, linux-block@vger.kernel.org,
        Linux MM <linux-mm@kvack.org>,
        Ross Zwisler <ross.zwisler@linux.intel.com>,
        Matthew Wilcox <willy@linux.intel.com>,
        Jason Gunthorpe <jgunthorpe@obsidianresearch.com>,
        haggaie@mellanox.com, Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>,
        Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>, Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>,
        jim.macdonald@everspin.com, sbates@raithin.com,
        Logan Gunthorpe <logang@deltatee.com>,
        David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>,
        "Raj, Ashok" <ashok.raj@intel.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/3] iopmem : A block device for PCIe memory
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> >>
> >> If you're only using the block-device as a entry-point to create
> >> dax-mappings then a device-dax (drivers/dax/) character-device might
> >> be a better fit.
> >>
> >
> > We chose a block device because we felt it was intuitive for users to
> > carve up a memory region but putting a DAX filesystem on it and creating
> > files on that DAX aware FS. It seemed like a convenient way to
> > partition up the region and to be easily able to get the DMA address
> > for the memory backing the device.
> >
> > That said I would be very keen to get other peoples thoughts on how
> > they would like to see this done. And I know some people have had some
> > reservations about using DAX mounted FS to do this in the past.
>
> I guess it depends on the expected size of these devices BARs, but I
> get the sense they may be smaller / more precious such that you
> wouldn't want to spend capacity on filesystem metadata? For the target
> use case is it assumed that these device BARs are always backed by
> non-volatile memory?  Otherwise this is a mkfs each boot for a
> volatile device.

Dan

Fair point and this is a concern I share. We are not assuming that all
iopmem devices are backed by non-volatile memory so the mkfs
recreation comment is valid. All in all I think you are persuading us
to take a look at /dev/dax ;-). I will see if anyone else chips in
with their thoughts on this.

>
> >>
> >> > 2. Memory Segment Spacing. This patch has the same limitations that
> >> > ZONE_DEVICE does in that memory regions must be spaces at least
> >> > SECTION_SIZE bytes part. On x86 this is 128MB and there are cases where
> >> > BARs can be placed closer together than this. Thus ZONE_DEVICE would not
> >> > be usable on neighboring BARs. For our purposes, this is not an issue as
> >> > we'd only be looking at enabling a single BAR in a given PCIe device.
> >> > More exotic use cases may have problems with this.
> >>
> >> I'm working on patches for 4.10 to allow mixing multiple
> >> devm_memremap_pages() allocations within the same physical section.
> >> Hopefully this won't be a problem going forward.
> >>
> >
> > Thanks Dan. Your patches will help address the problem of how to
> > partition a /dev/dax device but they don't help the case then BARs
> > themselves are small, closely spaced and non-segment aligned. However
> > I think most people using iopmem will want to use reasonbly large
> > BARs so I am not sure item 2 is that big of an issue.
>
> I think you might have misunderstood what I'm proposing.  The patches
> I'm working on are separate from a facility to carve up a /dev/dax
> device.  The effort is to allow devm_memremap_pages() to maintain
> several allocations within the same 128MB section.  I need this for
> persistent memory to handle platforms that mix pmem and system-ram in
> the same section.  I want to be able to map ZONE_DEVICE pages for a
> portion of a section and be able to remove portions of section that
> may collide with allocations of a different lifetime.

Oh I did misunderstand. This is very cool and would be useful to us.
One more reason to consider moving to /dev/dax in the next spin of
this patchset ;-).

Thanks

Stephen