Re: [PATCH RFC v2 02/24] scsi: allocate separate queue for reserved commands

Hannes Reinecke
2020-04-06T09:05:44Z

On 3/11/20 7:22 AM, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 10, 2020 at 09:08:56PM +0000, John Garry wrote:
>> On 10/03/2020 18:32, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>>> On Wed, Mar 11, 2020 at 12:25:28AM +0800, John Garry wrote:
>>>> From: Hannes Reinecke <hare@suse.com>
>>>>
>>>> Allocate a separate 'reserved_cmd_q' for sending reserved commands.
>>>
>>> Why? Reserved command specifically are not in any way tied to queues.
>>> .
>>>
>>
>> So the v1 series used a combination of the sdev queue and the per-host
>> reserved_cmd_q. Back then you questioned using the sdev queue for virtio
>> scsi, and the unconfirmed conclusion was to use a common per-host q. This is
>> the best link I can find now:
>>
>> https://www.mail-archive.com/linux-scsi@vger.kernel.org/msg83177.html
>
> That was just a question on why virtio uses the per-device tags, which
> didn't look like it made any sense. What I'm worried about here is
> mixing up the concept of reserved tags in the tagset, and queues to use
> them. Note that we already have the scsi_get_host_dev to allocate
> a scsi_device and thus a request_queue for the host itself. That seems
> like the better interface to use a tag for a host wide command vs
> introducing a parallel path.
>
Thinking about it some more, I don't think that scsi_get_host_dev() is
the best way of handling it.
Problem is that it'll create a new scsi_device with <hostno:this_id:0>,
which will then show up via eg 'lsscsi'.
This would be okay if 'this_id' would have been defined by the driver;
sadly, most drivers which are affected here do set 'this_id' to -1.
So we wouldn't have a nice target ID to allocate the device from, let
alone the problem that we would have to emulate a complete scsi device
with all required minimal command support etc.
And I'm not quite sure how well that would play with the exising SCSI
host template; the device we'll be allocating would have basically
nothing in common with the 'normal' SCSI devices.

What we could do, though, is to try it the other way round:
Lift the request queue from scsi_get_host_dev() into the scsi host
itself, so that scsi_get_host_dev() can use that queue, but we also
would be able to use it without a SCSI device attached.

Cheers,

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