• Christoph Hellwig's avatar
    block: improve handling of the magic discard payload · f9d03f96
    Christoph Hellwig authored
    Instead of allocating a single unused biovec for discard requests, send
    them down without any payload.  Instead we allow the driver to add a
    "special" payload using a biovec embedded into struct request (unioned
    over other fields never used while in the driver), and overloading
    the number of segments for this case.
    
    This has a couple of advantages:
    
     - we don't have to allocate the bio_vec
     - the amount of special casing for discard requests in the block
       layer is significantly reduced
     - using this same scheme for other request types is trivial,
       which will be important for implementing the new WRITE_ZEROES
       op on devices where it actually requires a payload (e.g. SCSI)
     - we can get rid of playing games with the request length, as
       we'll never touch it and completions will work just fine
     - it will allow us to support ranged discard operations in the
       future by merging non-contiguous discard bios into a single
       request
     - last but not least it removes a lot of code
    
    This patch is the common base for my WIP series for ranges discards and to
    remove discard_zeroes_data in favor of always using REQ_OP_WRITE_ZEROES,
    so it would be good to get it in quickly.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarChristoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
    f9d03f96
blk-core.c 92.2 KB