Merge tag 'dax-misc-for-4.7' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/nvdimm/nvdimm

Pull misc DAX updates from Vishal Verma:
 "DAX error handling for 4.7

   - Until now, dax has been disabled if media errors were found on any
     device.  This enables the use of DAX in the presence of these
     errors by making all sector-aligned zeroing go through the driver.

   - The driver (already) has the ability to clear errors on writes that
     are sent through the block layer using 'DSMs' defined in ACPI 6.1.

  Other misc changes:

   - When mounting DAX filesystems, check to make sure the partition is
     page aligned.  This is a requirement for DAX, and previously, we
     allowed such unaligned mounts to succeed, but subsequent
     reads/writes would fail.

   - Misc/cleanup fixes from Jan that remove unused code from DAX
     related to zeroing, writeback, and some size checks"

* tag 'dax-misc-for-4.7' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/nvdimm/nvdimm:
  dax: fix a comment in dax_zero_page_range and dax_truncate_page
  dax: for truncate/hole-punch, do zeroing through the driver if possible
  dax: export a low-level __dax_zero_page_range helper
  dax: use sb_issue_zerout instead of calling dax_clear_sectors
  dax: enable dax in the presence of known media errors (badblocks)
  dax: fallback from pmd to pte on error
  block: Update blkdev_dax_capable() for consistency
  xfs: Add alignment check for DAX mount
  ext2: Add alignment check for DAX mount
  ext4: Add alignment check for DAX mount
  block: Add bdev_dax_supported() for dax mount checks
  block: Add vfs_msg() interface
  dax: Remove redundant inode size checks
  dax: Remove pointless writeback from dax_do_io()
  dax: Remove zeroing from dax_io()
  dax: Remove dead zeroing code from fault handlers
  ext2: Avoid DAX zeroing to corrupt data
  ext2: Fix block zeroing in ext2_get_blocks() for DAX
  dax: Remove complete_unwritten argument
  DAX: move RADIX_DAX_ definitions to dax.c

1 files changed, 32 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/dax.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/dax.txt
index 7bde64014a89..ce4587d257d2 100644
--- a/Documentation/filesystems/dax.txt
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/dax.txt
@@ -79,6 +79,38 @@ These filesystems may be used for inspiration:
 - ext4: the fourth extended filesystem, see Documentation/filesystems/ext4.txt
 
 
+Handling Media Errors
+---------------------
+
+The libnvdimm subsystem stores a record of known media error locations for
+each pmem block device (in gendisk->badblocks). If we fault at such location,
+or one with a latent error not yet discovered, the application can expect
+to receive a SIGBUS. Libnvdimm also allows clearing of these errors by simply
+writing the affected sectors (through the pmem driver, and if the underlying
+NVDIMM supports the clear_poison DSM defined by ACPI).
+
+Since DAX IO normally doesn't go through the driver/bio path, applications or
+sysadmins have an option to restore the lost data from a prior backup/inbuilt
+redundancy in the following ways:
+
+1. Delete the affected file, and restore from a backup (sysadmin route):
+   This will free the file system blocks that were being used by the file,
+   and the next time they're allocated, they will be zeroed first, which
+   happens through the driver, and will clear bad sectors.
+
+2. Truncate or hole-punch the part of the file that has a bad-block (at least
+   an entire aligned sector has to be hole-punched, but not necessarily an
+   entire filesystem block).
+
+These are the two basic paths that allow DAX filesystems to continue operating
+in the presence of media errors. More robust error recovery mechanisms can be
+built on top of this in the future, for example, involving redundancy/mirroring
+provided at the block layer through DM, or additionally, at the filesystem
+level. These would have to rely on the above two tenets, that error clearing
+can happen either by sending an IO through the driver, or zeroing (also through
+the driver).
+
+
 Shortcomings
 ------------