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From: Keith Busch <keith.busch@intel.com>
To: Eric Sandeen <sandeen@sandeen.net>
Cc: "Darrick J. Wong" <darrick.wong@oracle.com>, linux-xfs@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] xfsprogs: Issue smaller discards at mkfs
Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2017 12:32:17 -0600	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20171026183216.GA27317@localhost.localdomain> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <0d50ca3b-0b27-8ac1-c102-9ea656f3f926@sandeen.net>

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 01:01:29PM -0500, Eric Sandeen wrote:
> On 10/26/17 12:49 PM, Eric Sandeen wrote:
> > Yeah, lots of devices are unhappy with large discards.  And yeah, in the
> > end I think this papers over a kernel and/or hardware problem.
> > 
> > But sometimes we do that, if only to keep things working reasonably
> > well with older kernels or hardware that'll never get fixed...
> > 
> > (TBH sometimes I regret putting mkfs-time discard in by default in the
> > first place.)
> 
> I think I left this on a too-positive note.  It seems pretty clear that there
> is no way to fix all of userspace to not issue "too big" discards, when
> "too big" isn't even well-defined, or specified by anything at all.

Yeah, I totally get this proposal is just a bandaid, and other user
space programs may suffer when used with devices behaving this way. XFS
is just very popular, so it's frequently reported as problematic against
large capacity devices.
 
> I'm not wise in the ways of queueing and throttling, but from my naiive
> perspective, it seems like something to be fixed in the kernel, or if it
> can't, export some new "maximum discard request size" which can be trusted?

The problem isn't really that a discard sent to the device was "too
big". It's that "too many" are issued at the same time, and there isn't
a way for a driver to limit the number of outstanding discards without
affecting read/write.

  reply	other threads:[~2017-10-26 18:27 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 10+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2017-10-26 14:41 [PATCH] xfsprogs: Issue smaller discards at mkfs Keith Busch
2017-10-26 16:25 ` Darrick J. Wong
2017-10-26 17:49   ` Eric Sandeen
2017-10-26 18:01     ` Eric Sandeen
2017-10-26 18:32       ` Keith Busch [this message]
2017-10-26 19:59         ` Darrick J. Wong
2017-10-26 21:24           ` Keith Busch
2017-10-26 22:24             ` Dave Chinner
2017-10-26 23:09               ` Keith Busch
2017-10-26 18:00   ` Keith Busch

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