On 24/04/29 07:32PM, Matthew Wilcox wrote: > On Mon, Apr 29, 2024 at 12:04:16PM -0500, John Groves wrote: > > This patch set introduces famfs[1] - a special-purpose fs-dax file system > > for sharable disaggregated or fabric-attached memory (FAM). Famfs is not > > CXL-specific in anyway way. > > > > * Famfs creates a simple access method for storing and sharing data in > > sharable memory. The memory is exposed and accessed as memory-mappable > > dax files. > > * Famfs supports multiple hosts mounting the same file system from the > > same memory (something existing fs-dax file systems don't do). > > Yes, but we do already have two filesystems that support shared storage, > and are rather more advanced than famfs -- GFS2 and OCFS2. What are > the pros and cons of improving either of those to support DAX rather > than starting again with a new filesystem? >
Thanks for paying attention to this Willy. This is a fair question; I'll share some thoughts on the rationale, but it's probably something that should be an ongoing dialog. We already have a LSFMM session planned that will discuss whether the famfs functionality should be merged into fuse, but GFS2 and OCFS2 are also potential candidates. (I've already seen Kent's reply and will get to that next) I work for a memory company, and the motivation here is to make disaggregated shared memory practically usable. Any approach that moves in that direction is goodness as far as we're concerned -- provided it doesn't insert years of delay. Some thoughts on famfs: * Famfs is not, not, not a general purpose file system. * One can think of famfs as a shared memory allocator where allocations can be accessed as files. For certain data analytics work flows (especially involving Apache Arrow data frames) this is really powerful. Consumers of data frames commonly use mmap(MAP_SHARED), and can benefit from the memory de-duplication of shared memory and don't need any new abstractions. * Famfs is not really a data storage tool. It's more of a shared-memroy allocation tool that has the benefit of allocations being accesssible (and memory-mappable) as files. So a lot of software can automatically use it. * Famfs is oriented to dumping sharable data into files and then allowing a scale-out cluster to share it (often read-only) to access a single copy in shared memory. * Although this audience probably already understands this, please forgive me for putting a fine point on it: memory mapping a famfs/fs-dax file does not use system-ram as a cache - it directly accesses the memory associated with a file. This would be true of all file systems with proper fs-dax support (of which there are not many, and currently only famfs that supports shared access to media/memory). Some thoughts on shared-storage file systems: * I'm no expert on GFS2 or OCFS2, but I've been around memory, file systems and storage since well before the turn of the century... * If you had brought up the existing fs-dax file systems, I would have pointed that they use write-back metadata, which does not reconcile with shared access to media - but these file systems do handle that. * The shared media file systems are still oriented to block devices that provide durable storage and page-oriented access. CXL DRAM is a character dax (devdax) device and does not provide durable storage. * fs-dax-style memory mapping for volatile cxl memory requires the dev_dax_iomap portion of this patch set - or something similar. * A scale-out shared media file system presumably requires some commitment to configure and manage some complexity in a distributed environment; whether that should be mandatory for enablement of shared memory is worthy of discussion. * Adding memory to the storage tier for GFS2/OCFS2 would add non-persistent media to the storage tier; whether this makes sense would be a topic that GFS2/OCFS2 developers/architects should get involved in if they're interested. Although disaggregated shared memory is not commercially available yet, famfs is being actively tested by multiple companies for several use cases and patterns with real and simulated shared memory. Demonstrations will start to surface in the coming weeks & months. Regards, John
