DISCARD (REQ_DISCARD, BLKDISCARD) is useful for thin provisioning.
It allows ZVOL clients to discard (unmap, trim) block ranges from
a ZVOL, thus optimizing disk space usage by allowing a ZVOL to
shrink instead of just grow.
We can't use zfs_space() or zfs_freesp() here, since these functions
only work on regular files, not volumes. Fortunately we can use the
low-level function dmu_free_long_range() which does exactly what we
want.
Currently the discard operation is not added to the log. That's not
a big deal since losing discard requests cannot result in data
corruption. It would however result in disk space usage higher than
it should be. Thus adding log support to zvol_discard() is probably
a good idea for a future improvement.
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
The Linux block device queue subsystem exposes a number of configurable
settings described in Linux block/blk-settings.c. The defaults for these
settings are tuned for hard drives, and are not optimized for ZVOLs. Proper
configuration of these options would allow upper layers (I/O scheduler) to
take better decisions about write merging and ordering.
Detailed rationale:
- max_hw_sectors is set to unlimited (UINT_MAX). zvol_write() is able to
handle writes of any size, so there's no reason to impose a limit. Let the
upper layer decide.
- max_segments and max_segment_size are set to unlimited. zvol_write() will
copy the requests' contents into a dbuf anyway, so the number and size of
the segments are irrelevant. Let the upper layer decide.
- physical_block_size and io_opt are set to the ZVOL's block size. This
has the potential to somewhat alleviate issue #361 for ZVOLs, by warning
the upper layers that writes smaller than the volume's block size will be
slow.
- The NONROT flag is set to indicate this isn't a rotational device.
Although the backing zpool might be composed of rotational devices, the
resulting ZVOL often doesn't exhibit the same behavior due to the COW
mechanisms used by ZFS. Setting this flag will prevent upper layers from
making useless decisions (such as reordering writes) based on incorrect
assumptions about the behavior of the ZVOL.
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
zvol_write() assumes that the write request must be written to stable storage
if rq_is_sync() is true. Unfortunately, this assumption is incorrect. Indeed,
"sync" does *not* mean what we think it means in the context of the Linux
block layer. This is well explained in linux/fs.h:
WRITE: A normal async write. Device will be plugged.
WRITE_SYNC: Synchronous write. Identical to WRITE, but passes down
the hint that someone will be waiting on this IO
shortly.
WRITE_FLUSH: Like WRITE_SYNC but with preceding cache flush.
WRITE_FUA: Like WRITE_SYNC but data is guaranteed to be on
non-volatile media on completion.
In other words, SYNC does not *mean* that the write must be on stable storage
on completion. It just means that someone is waiting on us to complete the
write request. Thus triggering a ZIL commit for each SYNC write request on a
ZVOL is unnecessary and harmful for performance. To make matters worse, ZVOL
users have no way to express that they actually want data to be written to
stable storage, which means the ZIL is broken for ZVOLs.
The request for stable storage is expressed by the FUA flag, so we must
commit the ZIL after the write if the FUA flag is set. In addition, we must
commit the ZIL before the write if the FLUSH flag is set.
Also, we must inform the block layer that we actually support FLUSH and FUA.
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
The WRITE_FLUSH, WRITE_FUA, and WRITE_FLUSH_FUA flags have been
introduced as a replacement for WRITE_BARRIER. This was done
to allow richer semantics to be expressed to the block layer.
It is the block layers responsibility to choose the correct way
to implement these semantics.
This change simply updates the bio's to use the new kernel API
which should be absolutely safe. However, since ZFS depends
entirely on this working as designed for correctness we do
want to be careful.
Closes#281
The blk_queue_stackable() queue flag was added in 2.6.27 to handle dm
stacking drivers. Prior to this request stacking drivers were detected
by checking (q->request_fn == NULL), for earlier kernels we revert to
this legacy behavior.
The open_bdev_exclusive() function has been replaced (again) by the
more generic blkdev_get_by_path() function. Additionally, the
counterpart function close_bdev_exclusive() has been replaced by
blkdev_put(). Because these functions are more generic versions
of the functions they replaced the compatibility macro must add
the FMODE_EXCL mask to ensure they are exclusive.
Closes#114
For legacy reasons the zvol.c and vdev_disk.c Linux compatibility
code ended up in sys/blkdev.h and sys/vdev_disk.h headers. While
there are worse places for this code to live it should be in a
linux/blkdev_compat.h header. This change moves this block device
Linux compatibility code in to the linux/blkdev_compat.h header
and updates all the correct #include locations. This is not a
functional change or bug fix, it is just code cleanup.
Etienne Dechamps
Brian Behlendorf