[PATCH v2 0/5] xen/blk: persistent grant rework

From: Juergen Gross
Date: Wed Aug 08 2018 - 10:26:18 EST


Persistent grants are used in the Xen's blkfront/blkback drivers to
avoid mapping/unmapping of I/O buffers in the backend for each I/O.

While this speeds up processing quite a bit there are problems related
to persistent grants in some configurations: domains with multiple
block devices making use of persistent grants might suffer from a lack
of grants if each of the block devices experienced a high I/O load at
some time. This is due to the number of persistent grants per device
only to be limited by a rather high maximum value, but never being
released even in case of longer times without any I/O.

This series modifies xen-blkback to unmap any domU page mapped via a
persistent grant after a timeout (default: 60 seconds). The timeout
is set to its default value again when a persistent grant has been
used for an I/O.

xen-blkfront is modified to scan every 10 seconds for persistent grants
not in use by blkback any more and to remove such grants.

The last 3 patches are small cleanups of blkfront and blkback drivers.

V2:
- patch 1: added new module parameter doc
- patch 1: removed PERSISTENT_GNT_WAS_ACTIVE flag
- patch 2: removed global worker active flag
- added new patch 4

Juergen Gross (5):
xen/blkback: don't keep persistent grants too long
xen/blkfront: cleanup stale persistent grants
xen/blkfront: reorder tests in xlblk_init()
xen/blkback: move persistent grants flags to bool
xen/blkback: remove unused pers_gnts_lock from struct xen_blkif_ring

Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-driver-xen-blkback | 10 ++
drivers/block/xen-blkback/blkback.c | 99 ++++++++++---------
drivers/block/xen-blkback/common.h | 14 +--
drivers/block/xen-blkfront.c | 110 ++++++++++++++++++---
4 files changed, 163 insertions(+), 70 deletions(-)

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2.13.7