Re: [PATCH 1/1] block, bfq: delete "bfq" prefix from cgroup filenames

From: Jens Axboe
Date: Mon Apr 08 2019 - 11:05:48 EST


On 4/8/19 9:04 AM, Johannes Thumshirn wrote:
> [+Cc Michal ]
> On Mon, Apr 08, 2019 at 04:54:39PM +0200, Paolo Valente wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Il giorno 8 apr 2019, alle ore 16:49, Johannes Thumshirn <jthumshirn@xxxxxxx> ha scritto:
>>>
>>> On Mon, Apr 08, 2019 at 04:39:35PM +0200, Paolo Valente wrote:
>>>> From: Angelo Ruocco <angeloruocco90@xxxxxxxxx>
>>>>
>>>> When bfq was merged into mainline, there were two I/O schedulers that
>>>> implemented the proportional-share policy: bfq for blk-mq and cfq for
>>>> legacy blk. bfq's interface files in the blkio/io controller have the
>>>> same names as cfq. But the cgroups interface doesn't allow two
>>>> entities to use the same name for their files, so for bfq we had to
>>>> prepend the "bfq" prefix to each of its files. However no legacy code
>>>> uses these modified file names. This naming also causes confusion, as,
>>>> e.g., in [1].
>>>>
>>>> Now cfq has gone with legacy blk, so there is no need any longer for
>>>> these prefixes in (the never used) bfq names. In view of this fact, this
>>>> commit removes these prefixes, thereby enabling legacy code to truly
>>>> use the proportional share policy in blk-mq.
>>>>
>>>> [1] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/7057
>>>
>>> Hmm, but isn't this a user-space facing interface and thus some sort of ABI?
>>> Do you know what's using it and what breaks due to this conversion?
>>>
>>
>> Yep, but AFAIK, the problem is exactly the opposite: nobody uses these
>> names for the proportional-share policy, or wants to use these names. I'm
>> CCing Lennart too, in case he has some improbable news on this.
>>
>> So the idea is to align names to what people expect, possibly before
>> more confusion arises.
>
> OK, crazy idea, not sure if Jens and Tejun will beat me for this, but
> symlinks?
>
> This way we can a) keep the old files and b) have them point to the new (a.k.a
> cfq style) files.

I did consider that, and that would be doable. But honestly, I'm having a
hard time seeing what issue we are attempting to fix by doing this.

--
Jens Axboe