* Christoph Hellwig <h...@lst.de> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 11:33:09AM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> > Limitations: this is a regular block device, and since the pmem areas
> > are not struct page backed, they are invisible to the rest of the
> > system (other than the block IO device), so direct IO to/from pmem
> > areas, direct mmap() or XIP is not possible yet. The page cache will
> > also shadow and double buffer pmem contents, etc.
>
> Unless you use the DAX support in ext2/4 and soon XFS, in which case
> we avoid that double buffering when doing read/write and mmap
Indeed, I missed that DAX support just went upstream in v4.0 - nice!
DAX may have some other limitations though that comes from not having
struct page * backing and using VM_MIXEDMAP, the following APIs might
not work on DAX files:
- splice
- zero copy O_DIRECT into DAX areas.
- futexes
- ( AFAICS hugetlbs won't work on DAX mmap()s yet - although with
the current nocache mapping that's probable the least of the
performance issues for now. )
Btw., what's the future design plan here? Enable struct page backing,
or provide special codepaths for all DAX uses like the special pte
based approach for mmap()s?
Thanks,
Ingo
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