Re: [PATCH v2 00/10] fsdax,xfs: Add reflink&dedupe support for fsdax

[Neal Gompa]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 7:53 PM Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 6:27 AM Matthew Wilcox <willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 08:21:59AM -0600, Goldwyn Rodrigues wrote:
> > > On 13:02 10/03, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > > > On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 07:30:41AM -0500, Neal Gompa wrote:
> > > > > Forgive my ignorance, but is there a reason why this isn't wired up to
> > > > > Btrfs at the same time? It seems weird to me that adding a feature
> > > >
> > > > btrfs doesn't support DAX.  only ext2, ext4, XFS and FUSE have DAX support.
> > > >
> > > > If you think about it, btrfs and DAX are diametrically opposite things.
> > > > DAX is about giving raw access to the hardware.  btrfs is about offering
> > > > extra value (RAID, checksums, ...), none of which can be done if the
> > > > filesystem isn't in the read/write path.
> > > >
> > > > That's why there's no DAX support in btrfs.  If you want DAX, you have
> > > > to give up all the features you like in btrfs.  So you may as well use
> > > > a different filesystem.
> > >
> > > DAX on btrfs has been attempted[1]. Of course, we could not
> >
> > But why?  A completeness fetish?  I don't understand why you decided
> > to do this work.
>
> Isn't DAX useful for pagecache minimization on read even if it is
> awkward for a copy-on-write fs?
>
> Seems it would be a useful case to have COW'd VM images on BTRFS that
> don't need superfluous page cache allocations.

I could also see this being useful for databases (and maybe even swap
files!) on Btrfs, if I'm understanding this feature correctly.


-- 
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!