[Drbd-dev] [PATCH v5 01/11] block: make generic_make_request handle arbitrarily sized bios

[Kent Overstreet]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 10:41:55PM -0400, Mike Snitzer wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 10 2015 at 10:00pm -0400,
> Martin K. Petersen <martin.petersen at oracle.com> wrote:
> 
> > >>>>> "Ming" == Ming Lin <mlin at kernel.org> writes:
> > 
> > Ming> Did you mean still use (UINT_MAX >> 9) in blkdev_issue_discard()?
> > 
> > Ming> But that doesn't work for dm-thinp. See Kent's suggestion to use
> > Ming> 1<<31.
> > 
> > I'm not sure why things are not working for dm-thinp. Presumably Kent's
> > code would split the discard at a granularity boundary so why would that
> > cause problems for dm?
> 
> DM-thinp processes discards internally before it passes them down (if
> configured to do so).  If a discard is smaller than the granularity of a
> thinp block (whose size is configurable) or if the start and end of the
> discard's extent is misaligned (relative to the thinp blocks mapped to
> the logical extent) then the discard won't actually discard partial
> thinp blocks.

This kind of logic really doesn't belong in dm - if it's needed, it really
belongs in bio_split() (which is supposed to work correctly for discards - so if
it is needed, then bio_split() needs fixing...)

IMO though it belongs in the driver - if a discard needs to be dropped because
it's too small and the hardware can't do it, that should be the driver's
responsibility.