On 3/12/08, Daniel Phillips <phillips@phunq.net> wrote:
You've eluded to NBD needing deadlock fixes quite a few times in the
past. I've even had some discussions with you on where you see NBD
lacking (userspace nbd-server doesn't lock memory or set PF_MEMALLOC,
etc). But I've lost track of what changes you have in mind for NBD.
Are you talking about a complete re-write or do you have specific
patches that will salvage the existing NBD client and/or server? Has
this work already been done and you just need to dust it off?
As an aside, using a kernel with the new per bdi dirty page accounting
I've not been able to hit any deadlock scenarios with NBD. Am I not
trying hard enough? Or are they now mythical? If real, do you have a
reproducible scenario that will cause NBD to deadlock?
I'm not interested in swap over NBD (e.g. network memory reserves?)
because in practice I've found that the VM doesn't allow non-swap NBD
use-cases to actually need that "netvm" sophistication... any other
workload that deadlocks NBD would interesting.
thanks,
Mike
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