Re: about TRIM/DISCARD support and barriers

[David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>]

On Mon, 2008-11-24 at 07:52 +0900, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Sun, 2008-11-23 at 13:39 +0000, David Woodhouse wrote:
> > > We don't attempt to put non-contiguous ranges into a single TRIM yet.
> > 
> > We don't even merge contiguous ranges -- I still need to fix the
> > elevators to stop writes crossing writes,
> 
> I don't think we want to do that ... it's legal if the write isn't a
> barrier and it will inhibit merging.  That may be just fine for a SSD,
> but it's not for spinning media since they get better performance out of
> merged writes.

No, I just mean writes _to the same sector_. At the moment, we happily
let those cross each other in the queue.

We do notice this situation and preserve the ordering if the two
requests cover _precisely_ the same range, but _overlapping_ writes may
happen in any order.

We should fix that, and it's only for _that_ purpose that I'm saying we
treat writes and discards as identical. And then we can drop the barrier
flag on discards.

And _then_ we can think about special cases which let us merge
non-contiguous discards.

-- 
David Woodhouse                            Open Source Technology Centre
David.Woodhouse@intel.com                              Intel Corporation