NAME

       ndctl-create-namespace - provision or reconfigure a namespace

SYNOPSIS

       ndctl create-namespace [<options>]

THEORY OF OPERATION

       The capacity of an NVDIMM REGION (contiguous span of persistent memory) is accessed via one or more
       NAMESPACE devices. REGION is the Linux term for what ACPI and UEFI call a DIMM-interleave-set, or a
       system-physical-address-range that is striped (by the memory controller) across one or more memory
       modules.

       The UEFI specification defines the NVDIMM Label Protocol as the combination of label area access methods
       and a data format for provisioning one or more NAMESPACE objects from a REGION. Note that label support
       is optional and if Linux does not detect the label capability it will automatically instantiate a
       "label-less" namespace per region. Examples of label-less namespaces are the ones created by the kernel’s
       memmap=ss!nn command line option (see the nvdimm wiki on kernel.org), or NVDIMMs without a valid
       namespace index in their label area.

       A namespace can be provisioned to operate in one of 4 modes, fsdax, devdax, sector, and raw. Here are the
       expected usage models for these modes: - fsdax: Filesystem-DAX mode is the default mode of a namespace
       when specifying ndctl create-namespace with no options. It creates a block device (/dev/pmemX[.Y]) that
       supports the DAX capabilities of Linux filesystems (xfs and ext4 to date). DAX removes the page cache
       from the I/O path and allows mmap(2) to establish direct mappings to persistent memory media. The DAX
       capability enables workloads / working-sets that would exceed the capacity of the page cache to scale up
       to the capacity of persistent memory. Workloads that fit in page cache or perform bulk data transfers may
       not see benefit from DAX. When in doubt, pick this mode.

       •   devdax: Device-DAX mode enables similar mmap(2) DAX mapping capabilities as Filesystem-DAX. However,
           instead of a block-device that can support a DAX-enabled filesystem, this mode emits a single
           character device file (/dev/daxX.Y). Use this mode to assign persistent memory to a virtual-machine,
           register persistent memory for RDMA, or when gigantic mappings are needed.

       •   sector: Use this mode to host legacy filesystems that do not checksum metadata or applications that
           are not prepared for torn sectors after a crash. Expected usage for this mode is for small boot
           volumes. This mode is compatible with other operating systems.

       •   raw: Raw mode is effectively just a memory disk that does not support DAX. Typically this indicates a
           namespace that was created by tooling or another operating system that did not know how to create a
           Linux fsdax or devdax mode namespace. This mode is compatible with other operating systems, but
           again, does not support DAX operation.

EXAMPLES

       Create a maximally sized pmem namespace in fsdax mode (the default)

           ndctl create-namespace

       Convert namespace0.0 to sector mode

           ndctl create-namespace -f -e namespace0.0 --mode=sector

OPTIONS

       -t, --type=
           Create a pmem or blk namespace (subject to available capacity). A pmem namespace supports the dax
           (direct access) capability to mmap(2) persistent memory directly into a process address space. A blk
           namespace access persistent memory through a block-window-aperture. Compared to pmem it supports a
           traditional storage error model (EIO on error rather than a cpu exception on a bad memory access),
           but it does not support dax.

       -m, --mode=

           •   "raw": expose the namespace capacity directly with limitations. Neither a raw pmem namepace nor
               raw blk namespace support sector atomicity by default (see "sector" mode below). A raw pmem
               namespace may have limited to no dax support depending the kernel. In other words operations like
               direct-I/O targeting a dax buffer may fail for a pmem namespace in raw mode or indirect through a
               page-cache buffer. See "fsdax" and "devdax" mode for dax operation.

           •   "sector": persistent memory, given that it is byte addressable, does not support sector
               atomicity. The problematic aspect of sector tearing is that most applications do not know they
               have a atomic sector update dependency. At least a disk rarely ever tears sectors and if it does
               it almost certainly returns a checksum error on access. Persistent memory devices will always
               tear and always silently. Until an application is audited to be robust in the presence of
               sector-tearing "safe" mode is recommended. This imposes some performance overhead and disables
               the dax capability. (also known as "safe" or "btt" mode)

           •   "fsdax": A pmem namespace in this mode supports dax operation with a block-device based
               filesystem (in previous ndctl releases this mode was named "memory" mode). This mode comes at the
               cost of allocating per-page metadata. The capacity can be allocated from "System RAM", or from a
               reserved portion of "Persistent Memory" (see the --map= option). Note that a filesystem is
               required for dax operation, the resulting raw block device (/dev/pmemX) will use the page cache.
               See "devdax" mode for raw device access that supports dax.

           •   "devdax": The device-dax character device interface is a statically allocated / raw access
               analogue of filesystem-dax (in previous ndctl releases this mode was named "dax" mode). It allows
               memory ranges to be mapped without need of an intervening filesystem. The device-dax is interface
               strict, precise and predictable. Specifically the interface:

               •   Guarantees fault granularity with respect to a given page size (4K, 2M, or 1G on x86) set at
                   configuration time.

               •   Enforces deterministic behavior by being strict about what fault scenarios are supported.
                   I.e. if a device is configured with a 2M alignment an attempt to fault a 4K aligned offset
                   will result in SIGBUS.

       -s, --size=
           For NVDIMM devices that support namespace labels, set the namespace size in bytes. Otherwise it
           defaults to the maximum size specified by platform firmware. This option supports the suffixes "k" or
           "K" for KiB, "m" or "M" for MiB, "g" or "G" for GiB and "t" or "T" for TiB.

               For pmem namepsaces the size must be a multiple of the
               interleave-width and the namespace alignment (see
               below).

       -a, --align
           Applications that want to establish dax memory mappings with page table entries greater than system
           base page size (4K on x86) need a persistent memory namespace that is sufficiently aligned. For
           "fsdax" and "devdax" mode this defaults to 2M. Note that "devdax" mode enforces all mappings to be
           aligned to this value, i.e. it fails unaligned mapping attempts. The "fsdax" alignment setting
           determines the starting alignment of filesystem extents and may limit the possible granularities, if
           a large mapping is not possible it will silently fall back to a smaller page size.

       -e, --reconfig=
           Reconfigure an existing namespace (change the mode, sector size, etc...). All namespace parameters,
           save uuid, default to the current attributes of the specified namespace. The namespace is then
           re-created with the specified modifications. The uuid is refreshed to a new value by default whenever
           the data layout of a namespace is changed, see --uuid= to set a specific uuid.

       -u, --uuid=
           This option is not recommended as a new uuid should be generated every time a namespace is
           (re-)created. For recovery scenarios however the uuid may be specified.

       -n, --name=
           For NVDIMM devices that support namespace labels, specify a human friendly name for a namespace. This
           name is available as a device attribute for use in udev rules.

       -l, --sector-size
           Specify the logical sector size (LBA size) of the Linux block device associated with an namespace.

       -M, --map=
           A pmem namespace in "fsdax" or "devdax" mode requires allocation of per-page metadata. The allocation
           can be drawn from either:

           •   "mem": typical system memory

           •   "dev": persistent memory reserved from the namespace

                   Given relative capacities of "Persistent Memory" to "System
                   RAM" the allocation defaults to reserving space out of the
                   namespace directly ("--map=dev"). The overhead is 64-bytes per
                   4K (16GB per 1TB) on x86.

       -f, --force
           Unless this option is specified the reconfigure namespace operation will fail if the namespace is
           presently active. Specifying --force causes the namespace to be disabled before the operation is
           attempted. However, if the namespace is mounted then the disable namespace and reconfigure namespace
           operations will be aborted. The namespace must be unmounted before being reconfigured.

       -L, --autolabel, --no-autolabel
           Legacy NVDIMM devices do not support namespace labels. In that case the kernel creates region-sized
           namespaces that can not be deleted. Their mode can be changed, but they can not be resized smaller
           than their parent region. This is termed a "label-less namespace". In contrast, NVDIMMs and
           hypervisors that support the ACPI 6.2 label area definition (ACPI 6.2 Section 6.5.10 NVDIMM Label
           Methods) support "labelled namespace" operation.

           •   There are two cases where the kernel will default to label-less operation:

               •   NVDIMM does not support labels

               •   The NVDIMM supports labels, but the Label Index Block (see UEFI 2.7) is not present and there
                   is no capacity aliasing between blk and pmem regions.

           •   In the latter case the configuration can be upgraded to labelled operation by writing an index
               block on all DIMMs in a region and re-enabling that region. The autolabel capability of ndctl
               create-namespace --reconfig tries to do this by default if it can determine that all DIMM
               capacity is referenced by the namespace being reconfigured. It will otherwise fail to autolabel
               and remain in label-less mode if it finds a DIMM contributes capacity to more than one region.
               This check prevents inadvertent data loss of that other region is in active use. The --autolabel
               option is implied by default, the --no-autolabel option can be used to disable this behavior.
               When automatic labeling fails and labelled operation is still desired the safety policy can be
               bypassed by the following commands, note that all data on all regions is forfeited by running
               these commands:

                   ndctl disable-region all
                   ndctl init-labels all
                   ndctl enable-region all

       -v, --verbose
           Emit debug messages for the namespace creation process

       -r, --region=

               A 'regionX' device name, or a region id number. The keyword 'all' can
               be specified to carry out the operation on every region in the system,
               optionally filtered by bus id (see --bus= option).

       -b, --bus=
           Enforce that the operation only be carried on devices that are attached to the given bus. Where bus
           can be a provider name or a bus id number.

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright (c) 2016 - 2018, Intel Corporation. License GPLv2: GNU GPL version 2
       http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html. This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
       There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

SEE ALSO

       ndctl-zero-labels(1), ndctl-init-labels(1), ndctl-disable-namespace(1), ndctl-enable-namespace(1), UEFI
       NVDIMM Label Protocol[1] Linux Persistent Memory Wiki[2]

NOTES

        1. UEFI NVDIMM Label Protocol
           http://www.uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/UEFI_Spec_2_7.pdf

        2. Linux Persistent Memory Wiki
           https://nvdimm.wiki.kernel.org

ndctl 61.2+                                        08/01/2018                              NDCTL-CREATE-NAMES(1)