Re: [dm-devel] [PATCH v14 00/11] Implement copy offload support

Nitesh Shetty
2023-08-14T16:56:19Z

On Sat, Aug 12, 2023 at 3:42 AM Bart Van Assche <bvanassche@acm.org> wrote:
>
> On 8/11/23 03:52, Nitesh Shetty wrote:
> > We achieve copy offload by sending 2 bio's with source and destination
> > info and merge them to form a request. This request is sent to driver.
> > So this design works only for request based storage drivers.
>
> [ ... ]
>
> > Overall series supports:
> > ========================
> > 1. Driver
> > - NVMe Copy command (single NS, TP 4065), including support
> > in nvme-target (for block and file back end).
> >
> > 2. Block layer
> > - Block-generic copy (REQ_OP_COPY_DST/SRC), operation with
> > interface accommodating two block-devs
> > - Merging copy requests in request layer
> > - Emulation, for in-kernel user when offload is natively
> > absent
> > - dm-linear support (for cases not requiring split)
> >
> > 3. User-interface
> > - copy_file_range
>
> Is this sufficient? The combination of dm-crypt, dm-linear and the NVMe
> driver is very common. What is the plan for supporting dm-crypt?

Plan is to add offload support for other dm targets as part of subsequent
series once current patchset merges, dm targets can use emulation to
achieve the same at present.

> Shouldn't bio splitting be supported for dm-linear?
Handling split is tricky in this case, if we allow splitting, there is
no easy way
to match/merge different src/dst bio's. Once we have multi range support then
we feel at least src bio's can be split. But this series split won't work.

Thank you,
Nitesh Shetty