Re: [PATCH 0/2] uring_cmd SQE corruptions

Jens Axboe
2025-02-12T23:55:36Z

On 2/12/25 4:46 PM, Caleb Sander Mateos wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 12, 2025 at 3:21?PM Keith Busch <kbusch@kernel.org> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Feb 12, 2025 at 03:07:30PM -0800, Caleb Sander Mateos wrote:
>>>
>>> Yes, we completely agree. We are working on incorporating Keith's
>>> patchset now. It looks like there is still an open question about
>>> whether userspace will need to enforce ordering between the requests
>>> (either using linked operations or waiting for completions before
>>> submitting the subsequent operations).
>>
>> In its current form, my series depends on you *not* using linked
>> requests. I didn't think it would be a problem as it follows an existing
>> pattern from the IORING_OP_FILES_UPDATE operation. That has to complete
>> in its entirety before prepping any subsequent commands that reference
>> the index, and using links would get the wrong results.
>
> As implementers of a ublk server, we would also prefer the current
> interface in your patch series! Having to explicitly order the
> requests would definitely make the interface more cumbersome and
> probably less performant. I was just saying that Ming and Pavel had
> raised some concerns about guaranteeing the order in which io_uring
> issues SQEs. IORING_OP_FILES_UPDATE is a good analogy. Do we have any
> examples of how applications use it? Are they waiting for a
> completion, linking it, or relying on io_uring to issue it
> synchronously?

Yes it's a good similar example - and I don't think it matters much
how it's used. If you rely on its completion before making progress AND
you set flags like IOSQE_ASYNC or LINK/DRAIN that will make it go async
on purposes, then yes you'd need to similarly link dependents on it. If
you don't set anything that forces it to go async, then it WILL complete
inline - there's nothing in its implementation that would cause it
needing to retry. Any failure would be fatal.

This is very much the same thing with the buf update / insertion, it'll
behave in exactly the same way. You could argue "but you need to handle
failures" and that is true. But if the failure case is that your
consumer of the buffer fails with an import failure, then you can just
as well handle that as you can the request getting failed with
-ECANCELED because your dependent link failed.

--
Jens Axboe