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Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/filesystems/dax.txt')
| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/filesystems/dax.txt | 38 |
1 files changed, 36 insertions, 2 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/dax.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/dax.txt index 7bde64014a89..0c16a22521a8 100644 --- a/Documentation/filesystems/dax.txt +++ b/Documentation/filesystems/dax.txt @@ -49,6 +49,7 @@ These block devices may be used for inspiration: - axonram: Axon DDR2 device driver - brd: RAM backed block device driver - dcssblk: s390 dcss block device driver +- pmem: NVDIMM persistent memory driver Implementation Tips for Filesystem Writers @@ -75,8 +76,41 @@ calls to get_block() (for example by a page-fault racing with a read() or a write()) work correctly. These filesystems may be used for inspiration: -- ext2: the second extended filesystem, see Documentation/filesystems/ext2.txt -- ext4: the fourth extended filesystem, see Documentation/filesystems/ext4.txt +- ext2: see Documentation/filesystems/ext2.txt +- ext4: see Documentation/filesystems/ext4.txt +- xfs: see Documentation/filesystems/xfs.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 |