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The nvdimm_flush() mechanism helps to reduce the impact of an ADR (asynchronous-dimm-refresh) failure. The ADR mechanism handles flushing platform WPQ (write-pending-queue) buffers when power is removed. The nvdimm_flush() mechanism performs that same function on-demand. When a pmem namespace is associated with a block device, an nvdimm_flush() is triggered with every block-layer REQ_FUA, or REQ_FLUSH request. These requests are typically associated with filesystem metadata updates. However, when a namespace is in device-dax mode, userspace (think database metadata) needs another path to perform the same flushing. In other words this is not required to make data persistent, but in the case of metadata it allows for a smaller failure domain in the unlikely event of an ADR failure. The new 'deep_flush' attribute is visible when the individual DIMMs backing a given interleave-set are described by platform firmware. In ACPI terms this is "NVDIMM Region Mapping Structures" and associated "Flush Hint Address Structures". Reads return "1" if the region supports triggering WPQ flushes on all DIMMs. Reads return "0" the flush operation is a platform nop, and in that case the attribute is read-only. Why sysfs and not an ioctl? An ioctl requires establishing a new ioctl function number space for device-dax. Given that this would be called on a device-dax fd an application could be forgiven for accidentally calling this on a filesystem-dax fd. Placing this interface in libnvdimm sysfs removes that potential for collision with a filesystem ioctl, and it keeps ioctls out of the generic device-dax implementation. Cc: Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@redhat.com> Cc: Masayoshi Mizuma <m.mizuma@jp.fujitsu.com> Signed-off-by: Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>
Linux kernel ============ This file was moved to Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst Please notice that there are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or ``make pdfdocs``. There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory, several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation. See Documentation/00-INDEX for a list of what is contained in each file. Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.