Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v4 0/6] nvdimm: support MAP_SYNC for memory-backend-file

[Dan Williams]

On Tue, Jan 30, 2018 at 10:02 PM, Haozhong Zhang
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Linux 4.15 introduces a new mmap flag MAP_SYNC, which can be used to
> guarantee the write persistence to mmap'ed files supporting DAX (e.g.,
> files on ext4/xfs file system mounted with '-o dax').

Wait, MAP_SYNC does not guarantee persistence. It makes sure that the
metadata is in sync after a fault. However, that does not make
filesystem-DAX safe for use with QEMU, because we still need to
coordinate DMA with fileystem operations. There is no way to do that
coordination from within a guest. QEMU needs to use device-dax if the
guest might ever perform DMA to a virtual-pmem range. See this patch
set for more details on the DAX vs DMA problem [1]. I think we need to
enforce this in the host kernel. I.e. do not allow file backed DAX
pages to be mapped in EPT entries unless / until we have a solution to
the DMA synchronization problem. Apologies for not noticing this
earlier.

[1]: https://lists.01.org/pipermail/linux-nvdimm/2017-December/013704.html