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authorVishal Verma <vishal.l.verma@intel.com>2016-04-21 22:13:46 +0300
committerVishal Verma <vishal.l.verma@intel.com>2016-05-18 21:16:57 +0300
commit4b0228fa1d753f77fe0e6cf4c41398ec77dfbd2a (patch)
tree323a881d26a983060f82477b8391717fa5b10e9d /Documentation/filesystems/dax.txt
parent679c8bd3b29428e736eabb7fc66a978f312f0c86 (diff)
downloadlinux-4b0228fa1d753f77fe0e6cf4c41398ec77dfbd2a.tar.xz
dax: for truncate/hole-punch, do zeroing through the driver if possible
In the truncate or hole-punch path in dax, we clear out sub-page ranges. If these sub-page ranges are sector aligned and sized, we can do the zeroing through the driver instead so that error-clearing is handled automatically. For sub-sector ranges, we still have to rely on clear_pmem and have the possibility of tripping over errors. Cc: Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com> Cc: Ross Zwisler <ross.zwisler@linux.intel.com> Cc: Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@redhat.com> Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de> Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Signed-off-by: Vishal Verma <vishal.l.verma@intel.com>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/filesystems/dax.txt')
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diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/dax.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/dax.txt
index 7bde64014a89..ce4587d257d2 100644
--- a/Documentation/filesystems/dax.txt
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/dax.txt
@@ -79,6 +79,38 @@ These filesystems may be used for inspiration:
- ext4: the fourth extended filesystem, see Documentation/filesystems/ext4.txt
+Handling Media Errors
+---------------------
+
+The libnvdimm subsystem stores a record of known media error locations for
+each pmem block device (in gendisk->badblocks). If we fault at such location,
+or one with a latent error not yet discovered, the application can expect
+to receive a SIGBUS. Libnvdimm also allows clearing of these errors by simply
+writing the affected sectors (through the pmem driver, and if the underlying
+NVDIMM supports the clear_poison DSM defined by ACPI).
+
+Since DAX IO normally doesn't go through the driver/bio path, applications or
+sysadmins have an option to restore the lost data from a prior backup/inbuilt
+redundancy in the following ways:
+
+1. Delete the affected file, and restore from a backup (sysadmin route):
+ This will free the file system blocks that were being used by the file,
+ and the next time they're allocated, they will be zeroed first, which
+ happens through the driver, and will clear bad sectors.
+
+2. Truncate or hole-punch the part of the file that has a bad-block (at least
+ an entire aligned sector has to be hole-punched, but not necessarily an
+ entire filesystem block).
+
+These are the two basic paths that allow DAX filesystems to continue operating
+in the presence of media errors. More robust error recovery mechanisms can be
+built on top of this in the future, for example, involving redundancy/mirroring
+provided at the block layer through DM, or additionally, at the filesystem
+level. These would have to rely on the above two tenets, that error clearing
+can happen either by sending an IO through the driver, or zeroing (also through
+the driver).
+
+
Shortcomings
------------