Re: [PATCH 02/21] block: Limit atomic writes according to bio and queue limits

Christoph Hellwig
2023-11-09T15:13:48Z

On Fri, Sep 29, 2023 at 10:27:07AM +0000, John Garry wrote:
> We rely the block layer always being able to send a bio of size
> atomic_write_unit_max without being required to split it due to request
> queue or other bio limits.
>
> A bio may contain min(BIO_MAX_VECS, limits->max_segments) vectors,
> and each vector is at worst case the device logical block size from
> direct IO alignment requirement.

A bio can have more than BIO_MAX_VECS if you use bio_init.

> +static unsigned int blk_queue_max_guaranteed_bio_size_sectors(
> + struct request_queue *q)
> +{
> + struct queue_limits *limits = &q->limits;
> + unsigned int max_segments = min_t(unsigned int, BIO_MAX_VECS,
> + limits->max_segments);
> + /* Limit according to dev sector size as we only support direct-io */

Who is "we", and how tells the caller to only ever use direct I/O?
And how would a type of userspace I/O even matter for low-level
block code. What if I wanted to use this for file system metadata?