Re: [PATCH 1/9] QUEUE_FLAG_NOWAIT to indicate device supports nowait

[Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>]

On 08/10/2017 05:49 AM, Goldwyn Rodrigues wrote:
> 
> 
> On 08/09/2017 09:17 PM, Jens Axboe wrote:
>> On 08/09/2017 08:07 PM, Goldwyn Rodrigues wrote:
>>>>>>>>> No, from a multi-device point of view, this is inconsistent. I
>>>>>>>>> have tried the request bio returns -EAGAIN before the split, but
>>>>>>>>> I shall check again. Where do you see this happening?
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> No, this isn't multi-device specific, any driver can do it.
>>>>>>>> Please see blk_queue_split.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> In that case, the bio end_io function is chained and the bio of
>>>>>>> the split will replicate the error to the parent (if not already
>>>>>>> set).
>>>>>>
>>>>>> this doesn't answer my question. So if a bio returns -EAGAIN, part
>>>>>> of the bio probably already dispatched to disk (if the bio is
>>>>>> splitted to 2 bios, one returns -EAGAIN, the other one doesn't
>>>>>> block and dispatch to disk), what will application be going to do?
>>>>>> I think this is different to other IO errors. FOr other IO errors,
>>>>>> application will handle the error, while we ask app to retry the
>>>>>> whole bio here and app doesn't know part of bio is already written
>>>>>> to disk.
>>>>>
>>>>> It is the same as for other I/O errors as well, such as EIO. You do
>>>>> not know which bio of all submitted bio's returned the error EIO.
>>>>> The application would and should consider the whole I/O as failed.
>>>>>
>>>>> The user application does not know of bios, or how it is going to be
>>>>> split in the underlying layers. It knows at the system call level.
>>>>> In this case, the EAGAIN will be returned to the user for the whole
>>>>> I/O not as a part of the I/O. It is up to application to try the I/O
>>>>> again with or without RWF_NOWAIT set. In direct I/O, it is bubbled
>>>>> out using dio->io_error. You can read about it at the patch header
>>>>> for the initial patchset at [1].
>>>>>
>>>>> Use case: It is for applications having two threads, a compute
>>>>> thread and an I/O thread. It would try to push AIO as much as
>>>>> possible in the compute thread using RWF_NOWAIT, and if it fails,
>>>>> would pass it on to I/O thread which would perform without
>>>>> RWF_NOWAIT. End result if done right is you save on context switches
>>>>> and all the synchronization/messaging machinery to perform I/O.
>>>>>
>>>>> [1] http://marc.info/?l=linux-block&m=149789003305876&w=2
>>>>
>>>> Yes, I knew the concept, but I didn't see previous patches mentioned
>>>> the -EAGAIN actually should be taken as a real IO error. This means a
>>>> lot to applications and make the API hard to use. I'm wondering if we
>>>> should disable bio split for NOWAIT bio, which will make the -EAGAIN
>>>> only mean 'try again'.
>>>
>>> Don't take it as EAGAIN, but read it as EWOULDBLOCK. Why do you say
>>> the API is hard to use? Do you have a case to back it up?
>>
>> Because it is hard to use, and potentially suboptimal. Let's say you're
>> doing a 1MB write, we hit EWOULDBLOCK for the last split. Do we return a
>> short write, or do we return EWOULDBLOCK? If the latter, then that
>> really sucks from an API point of view.
>>
>>> No, not splitting the bio does not make sense here. I do not see any
>>> advantage in it, unless you can present a case otherwise.
>>
>> It ties back into the "hard to use" that I do agree with IFF we don't
>> return the short write. It's hard for an application to use that
>> efficiently, if we write 1MB-128K but get EWOULDBLOCK, the re-write the
>> full 1MB from a different context.
>>
> 
> It returns the error code only and not short reads/writes. But isn't
> that true for all system calls in case of error?

It's not a hard error. If you wrote 896K in the example above, I'd
really expect the return value to be 896*1024. The API is hard to use
efficiently, if that's not the case.

> For aio, there are two result fields in io_event out of which one could
> be used for error while the other be used for amount of writes/reads
> performed. However, only one is used. This will not work with
> pread()/pwrite() calls though because of the limitation of return values.

Don't invent something new for this, the mechanism already exists for
returning a short read or write. That's how all of them have worked for
decades.

> Finally, what if the EWOULDBLOCK is returned for an earlier bio (say
> offset 128k) for a 1MB pwrite(), while the rest of the 7 128K are
> successful. What short return value should the system call return?

It should return 128*1024, since that's how much was successfully done
from the start offset. But yes, this is exactly the point that I brought
up, and why contesting Shaohua's suggestion to perhaps treat splits
differently should not be discarded so quickly.

-- 
Jens Axboe