Re: [PATCH] dio: falling through to buffered I/O when invalidationof a page fails

[Hisashi Hifumi <hifumi.hisashi@oss.ntt.co.jp>]

>
>>
>> Past discussion about this issue is as follows.
>> http://marc.info/?t=119343431200004&r=1&w=2
>> http://marc.info/?t=112656762800002&r=1&w=2
>>
>> 2, invalidate_inode_pages2_range() sets ret=-EIO when
>> invalidate_complete_page2()
>> fails, but this ret is cleared if do_launder_page() succeed on a page of
>> next index.
>
>Oops.  That's too bad.  So maybe we should fix it by not stomping on
>that return code?
>
>	ret2 = do_launder()
>	if (ret2 == 0)
>		ret2 = invalidate()
>	if (ret == 0)
>		ret = ret2
>
>I'd be surprised if we ever wanted to mask an -EIO when later pages
>laundered successfully.

This can preserve ret of -EIO. But it cannot be distinguished between
the error of invalidation and other error only by this fix.


>> I solved problems above by introducing invalidate_inode_pages3_range()
>> and falling
>> through to buffered I/O when invalidation of a page failed.
>
>Well, I like the idea of more intelligently dealing with the known
>problem between dio and ext3.  I'm not sure that falling back to
>buffered is right.

In the past discussion above, it was said that dio was a sort of best
effort function. So dio falls back to buffered IO when writing to hall, I think.
My idea is that this notion applies to this issue.

>
>> We can distinguish between failure of page invalidation and other errors
>> with the return value of invalidate_inode_pages3_range().
>
>I'm not sure duplicating the invalidation loop into a new function is
>the right thing.  Maybe we'd just tweak inode_pages2 to indicate to the
>caller the specific failing circumstances somehow.  Maybe.

It will be better that adding one parameter to invalidate_inode_pages2_range so
that caller can deal with a number of cases.

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