Re: bio segment constraints

Hannes Reinecke
2025-04-07T07:18:27Z

On 4/6/25 21:40, Sean Anderson wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm not really sure what guarantees the block layer makes regarding the
> segments in a bio as part of a request submitted to a block driver. As
> far as I can tell this is not documented anywhere. In particular,
>
> - Is bv_len aligned to SECTOR_SIZE?

The block layer always uses a 512 byte sector size, so yes.

> - To logical_sector_size?

Not necessarily. Bvecs are a consecutive list of byte ranges which
make up the data portion of a bio.
The logical sector size is a property of the request queue, which is
applied when a request is formed from one or several bios.
For the request the overall length need to be a multiple of the logical
sector size, but not necessarily the individual bios.

> - What if logical_sector_size > PAGE_SIZE?

See above.

> - What about bv_offset?

Same story. The eventual request needs to observe that the offset
and the length is aligned to the logical block size, but the individual
bios might not.

> - Is it possible to have a bio where the total length is a multiple of
>   logical_sector_size, but the data is split across several segments
>   where each segment is a multiple of SECTOR_SIZE?

Sure.

> - Is is possible to have segments not even aligned to SECTOR_SIZE?

Nope.

> - Can I somehow request to only get segments with bv_len aligned to
>   logical_sector_size? Or do I need to do my own coalescing and bounce
>   buffering for that?
>

The driver surely can. You should be able to set 'max_segment_size' to
the logical block size, and that should give you what you want.

> I've been reading some drivers (as well as stuff in block/) to try and
> figure things out, but it's hard to figure out all the places where
> constraints are enforced. In particular, I've read several drivers that
> make some big assumptions (which might be bugs?) For example, in
> drivers/mtd/mtd_blkdevs.c, do_blktrans_request looks like:
>
In general, the block layer has two major data items, bios and requests.
'struct bio' is the central structure for any 'upper' layers to submit
data (via the 'submit_bio()' function), and 'struct request' is the
central structure for drivers to fetch data for submission to the
hardware (via the 'queue_rq()' request_queue callback).
And the task of the block layer is to convert 'struct bio' into
'struct request'.

[ .. ]

> For context, tr->blkshift is either 512 or 4096, depending on the
> backend. From what I can tell, this code assumes the following:
>
mtd is probably not a good examples, as MTD has it's own set of
limitations which might result in certain shortcuts to be taken.

> - There is only one bio in a request. This one is a bit of a soft
>   assumption since we should only flush the pages in the bio and not the
>   whole request otherwise.
> - There is only one segment in a bio. This one could be reasonable if
>   max_segments was set to 1, but it's not as far as I can tell. So I
>   guess we just go off the end of the bio if there's a second segment?
> - The data is in lowmem OR bv_offset + bv_len <= PAGE_SIZE. kmap() only
>   maps a single page, so if we go past one page we end up in adjacent
>   kmapped pages.
>
Well, that code _does_ look suspicious. It really should be converted
to using the iov iterators.
But then again, it _might_ be okay if there are underlying MTD
restrictions which would devolve into MTD only having a single bvec.

Cheers,

Hannes
--
Dr. Hannes Reinecke Kernel Storage Architect
hare@suse.de +49 911 74053 688
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