Re: [PATCH v1 0/6] no-copy bvec

[Douglas Gilbert]

On 2020-12-23 11:04 a.m., James Bottomley wrote:
> On Wed, 2020-12-23 at 15:51 +0000, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 23, 2020 at 12:52:59PM +0000, Pavel Begunkov wrote:
> > > Can scatterlist have 0-len entries? Those are directly translated
> > > into bvecs, e.g. in nvme/target/io-cmd-file.c and
> > > target/target_core_file.c. I've audited most of others by this
> > > moment, they're fine.
> >
> > For block layer SGLs we should never see them, and for nvme neither.
> > I think the same is true for the SCSI target code, but please double
> > check.
>
> Right, no-one ever wants to see a 0-len scatter list entry.  The reason
> is that every driver uses the sgl to program the device DMA engine in
> the way NVME does.  a 0 length sgl would be a dangerous corner case:
> some DMA engines would ignore it and others would go haywire, so if we
> ever let a 0 length list down into the driver, they'd have to
> understand the corner case behaviour of their DMA engine and filter it
> accordingly, which is why we disallow them in the upper levels, since
> they're effective nops anyway.

When using scatter gather lists at the far end (i.e. on the storage device)
the T10 examples (WRITE SCATTERED and POPULATE TOKEN in SBC-4) explicitly
allow the "number of logical blocks" in their sgl_s to be zero and state
that it is _not_ to be considered an error.

Doug Gilbert