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Date:   Sun, 17 Feb 2019 09:42:50 +1100
From:   Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
To:     Ira Weiny <ira.weiny@intel.com>
Cc:     Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@ziepe.ca>, Christopher Lameter <cl@linux.com>,
        Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>,
        Jerome Glisse <jglisse@redhat.com>,
        Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>,
        Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>, Doug Ledford <dledford@redhat.com>,
        lsf-pc@lists.linux-foundation.org,
        linux-rdma <linux-rdma@vger.kernel.org>,
        Linux MM <linux-mm@kvack.org>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        John Hubbard <jhubbard@nvidia.com>,
        Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [LSF/MM TOPIC] Discuss least bad options for resolving
 longterm-GUP usage by RDMA
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On Fri, Feb 15, 2019 at 03:38:29PM -0800, Ira Weiny wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 15, 2019 at 03:00:31PM -0700, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> > On Fri, Feb 15, 2019 at 06:31:36PM +0000, Christopher Lameter wrote:
> > > On Fri, 15 Feb 2019, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > > 
> > > > > Since RDMA is something similar: Can we say that a file that is used for
> > > > > RDMA should not use the page cache?
> > > >
> > > > That makes no sense.  The page cache is the standard synchronisation point
> > > > for filesystems and processes.  The only problems come in for the things
> > > > which bypass the page cache like O_DIRECT and DAX.
> > > 
> > > It makes a lot of sense since the filesystems play COW etc games with the
> > > pages and RDMA is very much like O_DIRECT in that the pages are modified
> > > directly under I/O. It also bypasses the page cache in case you have
> > > not noticed yet.
> > 
> > It is quite different, O_DIRECT modifies the physical blocks on the
> > storage, bypassing the memory copy.
> >
> 
> Really?  I thought O_DIRECT allowed the block drivers to write to/from user
> space buffers.  But the _storage_ was still under the control of the block
> drivers?

Yup, in a nutshell. Even O_DIRECT on DAX doesn't modify the physical
storage directly - it ends up in the pmem driver and it does a
memcpy() to move the data to/from the physical storage and the user
space buffer. It's exactly the same IO path as moving data to/from
the physical storage into the page cache pages....

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com