Re: [dm-devel] [PATCH v4 00/13] support non power of 2 zoned devices

Javier González
2022-05-20T06:27:39Z

On 20.05.2022 08:07, Hannes Reinecke wrote:
>On 5/19/22 20:47, Damien Le Moal wrote:
>>On 5/19/22 16:34, Johannes Thumshirn wrote:
>>>On 19/05/2022 05:19, Damien Le Moal wrote:
>>>>On 5/19/22 12:12, Luis Chamberlain wrote:
>>>>>On Thu, May 19, 2022 at 12:08:26PM +0900, Damien Le Moal wrote:
>>>>>>On 5/18/22 00:34, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
>>>>>>>On Tue, May 17, 2022 at 10:10:48AM +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>>>>>>>>I'm a little surprised about all this activity.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>I though the conclusion at LSF/MM was that for Linux itself there
>>>>>>>>is very little benefit in supporting this scheme. It will massively
>>>>>>>>fragment the supported based of devices and applications, while only
>>>>>>>>having the benefit of supporting some Samsung legacy devices.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>FWIW,
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>That wasn't my impression from that LSF/MM session, but once the
>>>>>>>videos become available, folks can decide for themselves.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>There was no real discussion about zone size constraint on the zone
>>>>>>storage BoF. Many discussions happened in the hallway track though.
>>>>>
>>>>>Right so no direct clear blockers mentioned at all during the BoF.
>>>>
>>>>Nor any clear OK.
>>>
>>>So what about creating a device-mapper target, that's taking npo2 drives and
>>>makes them po2 drives for the FS layers? It will be very similar code to
>>>dm-linear.
>>
>>+1
>>
>>This will simplify the support for FSes, at least for the initial drop (if
>>accepted).
>>
>>And more importantly, this will also allow addressing any potential
>>problem with user space breaking because of the non power of 2 zone size.
>>
>Seconded (or maybe thirded).
>
>The changes to support npo2 in the block layer are pretty simple, and
>really I don't have an issue with those.
>Then adding a device-mapper target transforming npo2 drives in po2
>block devices should be pretty trivial.
>
>And once that is in you can start arguing with the the FS folks on
>whether to implement it natively.
>

So you are suggesting adding support for !PO2 in the block layer and
then a dm to present the device as a PO2 to the FS? This at least
addresses the hole issue for raw zoned block devices, so it can be a
first step.

This said, it seems to me that the changes to the FS are not being a
real issue. In fact, we are exposing some bugs while we generalize the
zone size support.

Could you point out what the challenges in btrfs are in the current
patches, that it makes sense to add an extra dm layer?

Note that for F2FS there is no blocker. Jaegeuk picked the initial
patches, and he agreed to add native support.