You do realise that local filesystems can silently change the
location of file data at any point in time, so there is no such
thing as a "stable mapping" of file data to block device addresses
in userspace?
If you want remote access to the blocks owned and controlled by a
filesystem, then you need to use a filesystem with a remote locking
mechanism to allow co-ordinated, coherent access to the data in
those blocks. Anything else is just asking for ongoing, unfixable
filesystem corruption or data leakage problems (i.e. security
issues).
And at least for XFS we have such a mechanism :) E.g. I have a
prototype of a pNFS layout that uses XFS+DAX to allow clients to do
RDMA directly to XFS files, with the same locking mechanism we use
for the current block and scsi layout in xfs_pnfs.c.
Christoph, did you manage to leap to the future and solve the
RDMA persistency hole? :)
e.g. what happens with O_DSYNC in this model? Or you did
a message exchange for commits?
