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Date:   Tue, 30 Mar 2021 10:18:39 -0700
From:   "Darrick J. Wong" <djwong@kernel.org>
To:     Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc:     harshad shirwadkar <harshadshirwadkar@gmail.com>,
        Leah Rumancik <leah.rumancik@gmail.com>,
        Ext4 Developers List <linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/2] ext4: add ioctl EXT4_FLUSH_JOURNAL
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On Tue, Mar 30, 2021 at 01:15:08PM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 30, 2021 at 09:32:23AM -0700, Darrick J. Wong wrote:
> > Why not make discarding the journal part of FITRIM then?
> 
> Unfortunately, the fstrim_range structure doesn't have a place for a
> flags field, and FITRIM works by specifying a range of LBA's:
> 
> struct fstrim_range {
> 	__u64 start;
> 	__u64 len;
> 	__u64 minlen;
> };
> 
> I suppose we could do something where some combination of start/len
> means "also checkpoint and discard the journal", but that seems rather
> kludgy.
> 
> > It occurred to me overnight that another way to look at this ioctl
> > proposal is that it checkpoints the filesystem and has a flag to discard
> > the journal blocks too.  Given that we're now only two days away from
> > my traditional bootfs[1] drum-banging day, and there's real user
> > demand[2] for bootloaders to be able to force a journal checkpoint,
> 
> How about if we have an ioctl which is "checkpoint journal", which can
> be file system independent (e.g., defined in include/uapi/linux/fs.h)
> which takes a u32 flags field, where we define a flag bit to mean
> "also discard the unused part of the journal after the checkpoint"?
> 
> It seems that would also solve your bootfs() use case.

Yeah, that's where I was going with this.  I just sent a new review for
the other patch with that level of focus. :)

--D

>       	      	  	      	     - Ted