Re: [RFC PATCH 7/7] dm: allow devices to revalidate existing zones

Benjamin Marzinski
2025-03-10T17:44:00Z

On Mon, Mar 10, 2025 at 08:59:26AM +0900, Damien Le Moal wrote:
> On 3/10/25 07:29, Benjamin Marzinski wrote:
> > dm_revalidate_zones() only allowed devices that had no zone resources
> > set up to call blk_revalidate_disk_zones(). If the device already had
> > zone resources, disk->nr_zones would always equal md->nr_zones so
> > dm_revalidate_zones() returned without doing any work. Instead, always
> > call blk_revalidate_disk_zones() if you are loading a new zoned table.
> >
> > However, if the device emulates zone append operations and already has
> > zone append emulation resources, the table size cannot change when
> > loading a new table. Otherwise, all those resources will be garbage.
> >
> > If emulated zone append operations are needed and the zone write pointer
> > offsets of the new table do not match those of the old table, writes to
> > the device will still fail. This patch allows users to safely grow and
> > shrink zone devices. But swapping arbitrary zoned tables will still not
> > work.
>
> I do not think that this patch correctly address the shrinking of dm zoned
> device: blk_revalidate_disk_zones() will look at a smaller set of zones, which
> will leave already hashed zone write plugs outside of that new zone range in the
> disk zwplug hash table. disk_revalidate_zone_resources() does not cleanup and
> reallocate the hash table if the number of zones shrinks.

This is necessary for DM. There could be plugged bios that are on on
these no longer in-range zones. They will obviously fail when they get
reissued, but we need to keep the plugs around so that they *do* get
reissued. A cleaner alternative would be to add code to immediately
error out all the plugged bios on shrinks, but I was trying to avoid
adding a bunch of code to deal with these cases (of course simply
disallowing them adds even less code).

-Ben

> For a physical drive,
> this can only happen if the drive is reformatted with some magic vendor unique
> command, which is why this was never implemented as that is not a valid
> production use case.
>
> To make things simpler, I think we should allow growing/shrinking zoned device
> tables, and much less swapping tables between zoned and not-zoned. I am more
> inclined to avoid all these corner cases by simply not supporting table
> switching for zoned device. That would be much safer I think.
> No-one complained about any issue with table switching until now, which likely
> means that no-one is using this. So what about simply returning an error for
> table switching for a zoned device ? If someone request this support, we can
> revisit this.
>
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Benjamin Marzinski <bmarzins@redhat.com>
> > ---
> > drivers/md/dm-zone.c | 23 +++++++++++++----------
> > 1 file changed, 13 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-)
> >
> > diff --git a/drivers/md/dm-zone.c b/drivers/md/dm-zone.c
> > index ac86011640c3..7e9ebeee7eac 100644
> > --- a/drivers/md/dm-zone.c
> > +++ b/drivers/md/dm-zone.c
> > @@ -164,16 +164,8 @@ int dm_revalidate_zones(struct dm_table *t, struct request_queue *q)
> > if (!get_capacity(disk))
> > return 0;
> >
> > - /* Revalidate only if something changed. */
> > - if (!disk->nr_zones || disk->nr_zones != md->nr_zones) {
> > - DMINFO("%s using %s zone append",
> > - disk->disk_name,
> > - queue_emulates_zone_append(q) ? "emulated" : "native");
> > - md->nr_zones = 0;
> > - }
> > -
> > - if (md->nr_zones)
> > - return 0;
> > + DMINFO("%s using %s zone append", disk->disk_name,
> > + queue_emulates_zone_append(q) ? "emulated" : "native");
> >
> > /*
> > * Our table is not live yet. So the call to dm_get_live_table()
> > @@ -392,6 +384,17 @@ int dm_set_zones_restrictions(struct dm_table *t, struct request_queue *q,
> > return 0;
> > }
> >
> > + /*
> > + * If the device needs zone append emulation, and the device already has
> > + * zone append emulation resources, make sure that the chunk_sectors
> > + * hasn't changed size. Otherwise those resources will be garbage.
> > + */
> > + if (!lim->max_hw_zone_append_sectors && disk->zone_wplugs_hash &&
> > + q->limits.chunk_sectors != lim->chunk_sectors) {
> > + DMERR("Cannot change zone size when swapping tables");
> > + return -EINVAL;
> > + }
> > +
> > /*
> > * Warn once (when the capacity is not yet set) if the mapped device is
> > * partially using zone resources of the target devices as that leads to
>
>
> --
> Damien Le Moal
> Western Digital Research