Date:	Fri, 8 Mar 2013 18:07:08 +0100
From:	Roger Pau Monné <roger.pau@...rix.com>
To:	Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@...cle.com>
CC:	"james.harper@...digoit.com.au" <james.harper@...digoit.com.au>,
	"linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	"xen-devel@...ts.xen.org" <xen-devel@...ts.xen.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH RFC 12/12] xen-block: implement indirect descriptors

On 05/03/13 22:46, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 05, 2013 at 06:07:57PM +0100, Roger Pau Monné wrote:
>> On 04/03/13 21:41, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk wrote:
>>> On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 11:28:55AM +0100, Roger Pau Monne wrote:
>>>> Indirect descriptors introduce a new block operation
>>>> (BLKIF_OP_INDIRECT) that passes grant references instead of segments
>>>> in the request. This grant references are filled with arrays of
>>>> blkif_request_segment_aligned, this way we can send more segments in a
>>>> request.
>>>>
>>>> The proposed implementation sets the maximum number of indirect grefs
>>>> (frames filled with blkif_request_segment_aligned) to 256 in the
>>>> backend and 64 in the frontend. The value in the frontend has been
>>>> chosen experimentally, and the backend value has been set to a sane
>>>> value that allows expanding the maximum number of indirect descriptors
>>>> in the frontend if needed.
>>>
>>> So we are still using a similar format of the form:
>>>
>>> <gref, first_sec, last_sect, pad>, etc.
>>>
>>> Why not utilize a layout that fits with the bio sg? That way
>>> we might not even have to do the bio_alloc call and instead can
>>> setup an bio (and bio-list) with the appropiate offsets/list?

I think we can already do this without changing the structure of the
segments, we could just allocate a bio big enough to hold all the
segments and queue them up (provided that the underlying storage device
supports bios of this size).

bio = bio_alloc(GFP_KERNEL, nseg);
if (unlikely(bio == NULL))
	goto fail_put_bio;
biolist[nbio++] = bio;
bio->bi_bdev    = preq.bdev;
bio->bi_private = pending_req;
bio->bi_end_io  = end_block_io_op;
bio->bi_sector  = preq.sector_number;

for (i = 0; i < nseg; i++) {
	rc = bio_add_page(bio, pages[i], seg[i].nsec << 9,
		seg[i].buf & ~PAGE_MASK);
	if (rc == 0)
		goto fail_put_bio;
}

This seems to work with Linux blkfront/blkback, and I guess biolist in
blkback only has one bio all the time.

>>> Meaning that the format of the indirect descriptors is:
>>>
>>> <gref, offset, next_index, pad>

Don't we need a length parameter? Also, next_index will be current+1,
because we already send the segments sorted (using for_each_sg) in blkfront.

>>>
>>> We already know what the first_sec and last_sect are - they
>>> are basically: sector_number +  nr_segments * (whatever the sector size is) + offset
>>
>> This will of course be suitable for Linux, but what about other OSes, I
>> know they support the traditional first_sec, last_sect (because it's
>> already implemented), but I don't know how much work will it be for them
>> to adopt this. If we have to do such a change I will have to check first
>> that other frontend/backend can handle this easily also, I wouldn't like
>> to simplify this for Linux by making it more difficult to implement in
>> other OSes...
> 
> I would think that most OSes use the same framework. The ones that
> are of notable interest are the Windows and BSD. Lets CC James here

Maybe I'm missing something here, but I don't see a really big benefit
of using this new structure for segments instead of the current one.

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