Re: [RFC 01/16] NOVA: Documentation

[Bart Van Assche <Bart.VanAssche@wdc.com>]

On Thu, 2017-08-03 at 00:48 -0700, Steven Swanson wrote:
> +### DAX Support
> +
> +Supporting DAX efficiently is a core feature of NOVA and one of the challenges
> +in designing NOVA is reconciling DAX support which aims to avoid file system
> +intervention when file data changes, and other features that require such
> +intervention.
> +
> +NOVA's philosophy with respect to DAX is that when a program uses DAX mmap to
> +to modify a file, the program must take full responsibility for that data and
> +NOVA must ensure that the memory will behave as expected.  At other times, the
> +file system provides protection.  This approach has several implications:
> +
> +1. Implementing `msync()` in user space works fine.
> +
> +2. While a file is mmap'd, it is not protected by NOVA's RAID-style parity
> +mechanism, because protecting it would be too expensive.  When the file is
> +unmapped and/or during file system recovery, protection is restored.
> +
> +3. The snapshot mechanism must be careful about the order in which in adds
> +pages to the file's snapshot image.

Hello Steven,

Thank you for having shared this very interesting work. After having read the
NOVA paper and patch 01/16 I have a question for you. Does the above mean that
COW is disabled for writable mmap-ed files? If so, what is the reason behind
this? Is there a fundamental issue that does not allow to implement COW for
writable mmap-ed files? Or have you perhaps tried to implement this and was the
performance not sufficient? Please note that I'm neither a filesystem nor a
persistent memory expert.

Thanks,

Bart.