Re: [PATCH -next 1/5] block: add disk sequence number

[Lennart Poettering]

On Di, 16.03.21 14:13, Christoph Hellwig (hch@xxxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 08:18:24PM +0000, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 09:02:38PM +0100, Matteo Croce wrote:
> > > From: Matteo Croce <mcroce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > >
> > > Add a sequence number to the disk devices. This number is put in the
> > > uevent so userspace can correlate events when a driver reuses a device,
> > > like the loop one.
> >
> > Should this be documented as monotonically increasing?  I think this
> > is actually a media identifier.  Consider (if you will) a floppy disc.
> > Back when such things were common, it was possible with personal computers
> > of the era to have multiple floppy discs "in play" and be prompted to
> > insert them as needed.  So shouldn't it be possible to support something
> > similar here -- you're really removing the media from the loop device.
> > With a monotonically increasing number, you're always destroying the
> > media when you remove it, but in principle, it should be possible to
> > reinsert the same media and have the same media identifier number.
>
> And we have some decent infrastructure related to media changes,
> grep for disk_events.  I think this needs to plug into that
> infrastructure instead of duplicating it.

I'd argue this makes sense in one way only, i.e. that whenever the
media_change event is seen the seqnum is implicitly bumped.

I am pretty sure though that loopback devices shouldn't synthesize
media_change events themselves though. There's quite a difference I
would argue between a real media change event caused by external
effect (i.e. humans/hw buttons/sensors) to loop device reuse, which is
exclusively triggered by internal events (i.e. local code). Moreover I
think the loopback subsystem should manage the seqnum on its own,
since it ideally would return the assigned seqnum immediately from the
attachment ioctl, i.e. it shouldn't just be a side-effect of
attachment, but a part of it, if you follow what I mean.

Does that make sense?

Matteo, would it make sense to extend your patch set to bump the
seqnum implicitly on media_change for devices that implement that?

Lennart