Re: Broken dio refcounting leads to livelock?

[Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@redhat.com>]

"Darrick J. Wong" <darrick.wong@oracle.com> writes:

> It looks like we're issuing two bios to satisfy a particular dio.
> However, the first bio completes before the submitter calls finish_plug??
>
> I guess this means that blk_start_plug no longer plugs up io requests,
> which means that the end_io function tries to wake up the submitter
> before it's even had a chance to issue the second bio.

blk_start_plug was always a hint.  If you exceed a certain number of
requests (BLK_MAX_REQUEST_COUNT, which is 16) or a certain size of
request (BLK_PLUG_FLUSH_SIZE, which is 128k), the block layer will flush
the plug list.

> This is surprising to me, because I was under the impression that
> blk_{start,finish}_plug held all the bios so there was no chance that
> any of them would issue (let alone call end_io) before finish_plug.

Definitely not the case.  The plug list is just a performance
optimization.

Cheers,
Jeff