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Date:   Tue, 7 Jul 2020 13:57:05 +0100
From:   Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
To:     Goldwyn Rodrigues <rgoldwyn@suse.de>
Cc:     Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org,
        linux-btrfs@vger.kernel.org, fdmanana@gmail.com, dsterba@suse.cz,
        david@fromorbit.com, darrick.wong@oracle.com,
        cluster-devel@redhat.com, linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org,
        linux-xfs@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: always fall back to buffered I/O after invalidation failures,
 was: Re: [PATCH 2/6] iomap: IOMAP_DIO_RWF_NO_STALE_PAGECACHE return if page
 invalidation fails
Message-ID: <20200707125705.GK25523@casper.infradead.org>
References: <20200629192353.20841-1-rgoldwyn@suse.de>
 <20200629192353.20841-3-rgoldwyn@suse.de>
 <20200701075310.GB29884@lst.de>
 <20200707124346.xnr5gtcysuzehejq@fiona>
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On Tue, Jul 07, 2020 at 07:43:46AM -0500, Goldwyn Rodrigues wrote:
> On  9:53 01/07, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 02:23:49PM -0500, Goldwyn Rodrigues wrote:
> > > From: Goldwyn Rodrigues <rgoldwyn@suse.com>
> > > 
> > > For direct I/O, add the flag IOMAP_DIO_RWF_NO_STALE_PAGECACHE to indicate
> > > that if the page invalidation fails, return back control to the
> > > filesystem so it may fallback to buffered mode.
> > > 
> > > Reviewed-by: Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com>
> > > Signed-off-by: Goldwyn Rodrigues <rgoldwyn@suse.com>
> > 
> > I'd like to start a discussion of this shouldn't really be the
> > default behavior.  If we have page cache that can't be invalidated it
> > actually makes a whole lot of sense to not do direct I/O, avoid the
> > warnings, etc.
> > 
> > Adding all the relevant lists.
> 
> Since no one responded so far, let me see if I can stir the cauldron :)
> 
> What error should be returned in case of such an error? I think the

Christoph's message is ambiguous.  I don't know if he means "fail the
I/O with an error" or "satisfy the I/O through the page cache".  I'm
strongly in favour of the latter.  Indeed, I'm in favour of not invalidating
the page cache at all for direct I/O.  For reads, I think the page cache
should be used to satisfy any portion of the read which is currently
cached.  For writes, I think we should write into the page cache pages
which currently exist, and then force those pages to be written back,
but left in cache.