linux-ext4 - Re: do not disable ext4 discards on first discard failure? [was: Re: dm snapshot: ignore discards issued to the snapshot-origin target]

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Date:	Mon, 2 May 2011 08:48:04 -0400
From:	Mike Snitzer <snitzer@...hat.com>
To:	Lukas Czerner <lczerner@...hat.com>
Cc:	Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org>, sandeen@...hat.com,
	DarkNovaNick@...il.com, linux-lvm@...hat.com,
	linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org, Alasdair G Kergon <agk@...hat.com>,
	device-mapper development <dm-devel@...hat.com>
Subject: Re: do not disable ext4 discards on first discard failure? [was: Re:
 dm snapshot: ignore discards issued to the snapshot-origin target]

On Mon, May 02 2011 at  6:24am -0400,
Lukas Czerner <lczerner@...hat.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 2 May 2011, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, May 02, 2011 at 09:13:08AM +0100, Alasdair G Kergon wrote:
> > > On Mon, May 02, 2011 at 09:16:21AM +0200, Lukas Czerner wrote:
> > > > However when we have dm device where part of the device supports
> > > > discard due to underlying hardware capability we just can not return
> > > > EOPNOTSUPP from blkdev_issue_discard, because it is just not true! 
> > > 
> > > EOPNOTSUPP from dm means the operation was not supported on that *one* bio.
> > > It does *not* tell you anything in general about the device, or whether
> > > you'd get the same error from different bios in future.
> > 
> > Exactly.  We already have the information in the queue limits to tell
> > the filesystem if discard is supported at all or not.
> > 
> 
> So I gave it a try. First of all the device composed of SSD and spinning
> disk does export discard_support information properly, however it also
> advertise discard_zeroes_data which is wrong and possibly dangerous and
> should be fixed!

You're effectively advocating that blk_stack_limits() needs to clear the
topmost device's discard_zeroes_data flag if any one bottom device does
not have discard_zeroes_data.

> And second of all, strictly speaking if EOPNOTSUPP from dm means that
> operation was not supported on that *one* bio, blkdev_issue_discard()
> should handle that and do not return EOPNOTSUPP further if queue limits
> tells that device has discard support. Is this acceptable solution for
> you guys ? I can make that change since I am changing blkdev_issue_discard()
> anyway. Or, we can make that change in filesystem where we disable
> discard on mount time, when we notice that discard mount option was
> specified, but the device does not support it (we should probably do
> this regardless on blkdev_issue_discard() change).

The blkdev_issue_discard() change you propose could be fine (mask
EOPNOTSUPP return if device advertises support for discards) -- though
Eric said we shouldn't ever say we did something when we didn't.

But that blkdev_issue_discard() change is really only safe if the
discard_zeroes_data flag is cleared by blk_stack_limits() if finds
inconsistent discard_zeroes_data support.

Mike
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