[Drbd-dev] [dm-devel] [PATCH v5 12/12] block: Only clone bio vecs that are in use

[Tejun Heo]

Hello,

On Wed, Aug 08, 2012 at 04:47:46PM -0700, Muthu Kumar wrote:
> You are changing the meaning of __bio_clone() here. In old code, the
> number of io_vecs, bi_idx, bi_vcnt are preserved. But in this modified
> code, you are mapping bio_src's bi_iovec[bi_idx] to bio_dests
> bi_iovec[0] and also restricting the number of allocated io_vecs of
> the clone. It may be useful for cases were we would like a identical
> copy of the original bio (may not be in current code base, but this
> implementation is definitely not what one would expect from the name
> "clone").

Implementation details changed somewhat but the high-level semantics
didn't change at all.  Any driver not messing with bio internals - and
they shouldn't - shouldn't notice the change.  No in-kernel drivers
seem to be broken by the change.  If you ask me, this looks more like
a bug fix to me where the bug is a silly behavior restricting
usefulness of the interface.

> May be, call this new implementation some thing else (and use it for bcache)?

This doesn't only change __bio_clone() but all clone interface stacked
on top of it, so, no way.  This ain't windows.

Thanks.

-- 
tejun