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

[Kent Overstreet]

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.