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From:   Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>
Date:   Tue, 7 Jan 2020 06:22:54 -0800
Message-ID: <CAPcyv4jZE35sbDo6J4ihioEUFTuekJ3_h0=2Ra4PY+xn2xn1cQ@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 01/19] dax: remove block device dependencies
To:     Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc:     Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@redhat.com>,
        Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>,
        Miklos Szeredi <miklos@szeredi.hu>,
        linux-nvdimm <linux-nvdimm@lists.01.org>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        "Dr. David Alan Gilbert" <dgilbert@redhat.com>,
        virtio-fs@redhat.com, Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@redhat.com>,
        linux-fsdevel <linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org>
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On Tue, Jan 7, 2020 at 4:52 AM Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 01:10:14PM -0500, Vivek Goyal wrote:
> > > Agree. In retrospect it was my laziness in the dax-device
> > > implementation to expect the block-device to be available.
> > >
> > > It looks like fs_dax_get_by_bdev() is an intercept point where a
> > > dax_device could be dynamically created to represent the subset range
> > > indicated by the block-device partition. That would open up more
> > > cleanup opportunities.
> >
> > Hi Dan,
> >
> > After a long time I got time to look at it again. Want to work on this
> > cleanup so that I can make progress with virtiofs DAX paches.
> >
> > I am not sure I understand the requirements fully. I see that right now
> > dax_device is created per device and all block partitions refer to it. If
> > we want to create one dax_device per partition, then it looks like this
> > will be structured more along the lines how block layer handles disk and
> > partitions. (One gendisk for disk and block_devices for partitions,
> > including partition 0). That probably means state belong to whole device
> > will be in common structure say dax_device_common, and per partition state
> > will be in dax_device and dax_device can carry a pointer to
> > dax_device_common.
> >
> > I am also not sure what does it mean to partition dax devices. How will
> > partitions be exported to user space.
>
> Dan, last time we talked you agreed that partitioned dax devices are
> rather pointless IIRC.  Should we just deprecate partitions on DAX
> devices and then remove them after a cycle or two?

That does seem a better plan than trying to force partition support
where it is not needed.