Re: bio segment constraints

Christoph Hellwig
2025-04-07T07:07:18Z

On Sun, Apr 06, 2025 at 03:40:04PM -0400, 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,

First you need to define what segment you mean. We have at least two and
a half historical uses of the name. One is for each bio_vec attached to
the bio, either directly as submitted into ->submit_bio for bio based
drivers (case 1a), or generated by bio_split_to_limits (case 1b), which
is called for every blk-mq driver before calling into ->queue_rq(s) or
explicitly called by a few bio based driver.

The other is the bio-vec synthesized by bio_for_each_segment (case 2).

> - Is bv_len aligned to SECTOR_SIZE?

Yes.

> - To logical_sector_size?

Yes.

> - What if logical_sector_size > PAGE_SIZE?

Still always aligned to logical_sector_size.

> - What about bv_offset?

bv_offset is a memory offset and must only be aligned to the
dma_alignment limit.

> - 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?

Yes.

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

No.

> - Can I somehow request to only get segments with bv_len aligned to
> logical_sector_size?

For drivers that use bio_split_to_limits implicitly or explicitly you can
do that by setting the right seg_boundary_mask.

> make some big assumptions (which might be bugs?) For example, in
> drivers/mtd/mtd_blkdevs.c, do_blktrans_request looks like:

> - 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.

It always operates on the first bio in the request and then uses
blk_update_request to move the context past that. It is an old
and somewhat arkane way to write drivers, but should work. The
rq_for_each_segment looks do call flush_dcache_page look horribly
wrong for this model, though.

> - 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.

Yes, this looks broken.

> Am I missing something here? Handling highmem seems like a persistent
> issue. E.g. drivers/mtd/ubi/block.c doesn't even bother doing a kmap.
> Should both of these have BLK_FEAT_BOUNCE_HIGH?

BLK_FEAT_BOUNCE_HIGH needs to go away rather sooner than later.

in the short run the best fix would be to synthesized a
bio_for_each_segment like bio_vec that stays inside a single page
using bio_iter_iovec) at the top of do_blktrans_request and use
that for all references to the data.