Re: [PATCH 28/60] block: introduce QUEUE_FLAG_SPLIT_MP

[Kent Overstreet]

On Thu, Nov 03, 2016 at 06:38:57PM +0800, Ming Lei wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 2, 2016 at 11:08 AM, Kent Overstreet
> <kent.overstreet@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Mon, Oct 31, 2016 at 08:39:15AM -0700, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> >> On Sat, Oct 29, 2016 at 04:08:27PM +0800, Ming Lei wrote:
> >> > Some drivers(such as dm) should be capable of dealing with multipage
> >> > bvec, but the incoming bio may be too big, such as, a new singlepage bvec
> >> > bio can't be cloned from the bio, or can't be allocated to singlepage
> >> > bvec with same size.
> >> >
> >> > At least crypt dm, log writes and bcache have this kind of issue.
> >>
> >> We already have the segment_size limitation for request based drivers.
> >> I'd rather extent it to bio drivers if really needed.
> >>
> >> But then again we should look into not having this limitation.  E.g.
> >> for bcache I'd be really surprised if it's that limited, given that
> >> Kent came up with this whole multipage bvec scheme.
> >
> > AFAIK the only issue is with drivers that may have to bounce bios - pages that
> > were contiguous in the original bio won't necessarily be contiguous in the
> > bounced bio, thus bouncing might require more than BIO_MAX_SEGMENTS bvecs.
> >
> > I don't know what Ming's referring to by "singlepage bvec bios".
> >
> > Anyways, bouncing comes up in multiple places so we probably need to come up
> > with a generic solution for that. Other than that, there shouldn't be any issues
> > or limitations - if you're not bouncing, there's no need to clone the bvecs.
> 
> AFAIK, the only special case is bch_data_verify(): drivers/md/bcache/debug.c,
> for other bio_clone(), no direct access to io vec table, so default
> multipage bvec
> copy is fine.
> 
> I will remove the flag and try to fix bch_data_verify() by using multiple bio,
> and I remembered I cooked patch to do that long time ago, :-)

You can #ifdef out the bch_data_verify() code, it's debug code that hasn't been
used in ages.