[PATCH v7 0/3] FDP and per-io hints

[Javier González]

On 04.10.2024 14:30, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>On Fri, Oct 04, 2024 at 08:52:33AM +0200, Javier González wrote:
>> So, considerign that file system _are_ able to use temperature hints and
>> actually make them work, why don't we support FDP the same way we are
>> supporting zones so that people can use it in production?
>
>Because apparently no one has tried it.  It should be possible in theory,
>but for example unless you have power of 2 reclaim unit size size it
>won't work very well with XFS where the AGs/RTGs must be power of two
>aligned in the LBA space, except by overprovisioning the LBA space vs
>the capacity actually used.

This is good. I think we should have at least a FS POC with data
placement support to be able to drive conclusions on how the interface
and requirements should be. Until we have that, we can support the
use-cases that we know customers are asking for, i.e., block-level hints
through the existing temperature API.

>
>> I agree that down the road, an interface that allows hints (many more
>> than 5!) is needed. And in my opinion, this interface should not have
>> semintics attached to it, just a hint ID, #hints, and enough space to
>> put 100s of them to support storage node deployments. But this needs to
>> come from the users of the hints / zones / streams / etc,  not from
>> us vendors. We do not have neither details on how they deploy these
>> features at scale, nor the workloads to validate the results. Anything
>> else will probably just continue polluting the storage stack with more
>> interfaces that are not used and add to the problem of data placement
>> fragmentation.
>
>Please always mentioned what layer you are talking about.  At the syscall
>level the temperatur hints are doing quite ok.  A full stream separation
>would obviously be a lot better, as would be communicating the zone /
>reclaim unit / etc size.

I mean at the syscall level. But as mentioned above, we need to be very
sure that we have a clear use-case for that. If we continue seeing hints
being use in NVMe or other protocols, and the number increase
significantly, we can deal with it later on.

>
>As an interface to a driver that doesn't natively speak temperature
>hint on the other hand it doesn't work at all.
>
>> The issue is that the first series of this patch, which is as simple as
>> it gets, hit the list in May. Since then we are down paths that lead
>> nowhere. So the line between real technical feedback that leads to
>> a feature being merged, and technical misleading to make people be a
>> busy bee becomes very thin. In the whole data placement effort, we have
>> been down this path many times, unfortunately...
>
>Well, the previous round was the first one actually trying to address the
>fundamental issue after 4 month.  And then after a first round of feedback
>it gets shutdown somehow out of nowhere.  As a maintainer and review that
>is the kinda of contributors I have a hard time taking serious.

I am not sure I understand what you mean in the last sentece, so I will
not respond filling blanks with a bad interpretation.

In summary, what we are asking for is to take the patches that cover the
current use-case, and work together on what might be needed for better
FS support. For this, it seems you and Hans have a good idea of what you
want to have based on XFS. We can help review or do part of the work,
but trying to guess our way will only delay existing customers using
existing HW.