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Message-ID: <20070221084613.GB3924@kernel.dk>
Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2007 09:46:13 +0100
From: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@...cle.com>
To: Tejun Heo <htejun@...il.com>
Cc: Robert Hancock <hancockr@...w.ca>,
linux-kernel <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
linux-ide@...r.kernel.org, edmudama@...il.com,
Nicolas.Mailhot@...oste.net, Jeff Garzik <jeff@...zik.org>,
Alan Cox <alan@...rguk.ukuu.org.uk>,
Mark Lord <mlord@...ox.com>, Ric Wheeler <ric@....com>,
Dongjun Shin <d.j.shin@...sung.com>,
Hannes Reinecke <hare@...e.de>
Subject: Re: libata FUA revisited
On Wed, Feb 21 2007, Tejun Heo wrote:
> [cc'ing Ric, Hannes and Dongjun, Hello. Feel free to drag other people in.]
>
> Robert Hancock wrote:
> > Jens Axboe wrote:
> >> But we can't really change that, since you need the cache flushed before
> >> issuing the FUA write. I've been advocating for an ordered bit for
> >> years, so that we could just do:
> >>
> >> 3. w/FUA+ORDERED
> >>
> >> normal operation -> barrier issued -> write barrier FUA+ORDERED
> >> -> normal operation resumes
> >>
> >> So we don't have to serialize everything both at the block and device
> >> level. I would have made FUA imply this already, but apparently it's not
> >> what MS wanted FUA for, so... The current implementations take the FUA
> >> bit (or WRITE FUA) as a hint to boost it to head of queue, so you are
> >> almost certainly going to jump ahead of already queued writes. Which we
> >> of course really do not.
>
> Yeah, I think if we have tagged write command and flush tagged (or
> barrier tagged) things can be pretty efficient. Again, I'm much more
> comfortable with separate opcodes for those rather than bits changing
> the behavior.
ORDERED+FUA NCQ would still be preferable to an NCQ enabled flush
command, though.
> Another idea Dongjun talked about while drinking in LSF was ranged
> flush. Not as flexible/efficient as the previous option but much less
> intrusive and should help quite a bit, I think.
But that requires extensive tracking, I'm not so sure the implementation
of that for barriers would be very clean. It'd probably be good for
fsync, though.
--
Jens Axboe
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