I see. I remember Jens Axboe mentioning something like this with IDE.
So, in this case, you want every such chunk to check if its completed
filling up a buffer and then trigger a wakeup on that ?
But, does this also mean that in such a case combining requests beyond this
limit doesn't really help ? (Reordering requests to get contiguity would
help of course in terms of seek times, I guess, but not merging beyond this
limit)
>> >Which is exactly why we have one kiobuf per higher-level buffer, and
>> >we chain together kiobufs when we need to for a long request, but we
>> >still get the independent completion notifiers.
>>
>> As I mentioned above, the alternative is to have the i/o completion
related
>> linkage information within the wakeup structures instead. That way, it
>> doesn't matter to the lower level driver what higher level structure we
>> have above (maybe buffer heads, may be page cache structures, may be
>> kiobufs). We only chain together memory descriptors for the buffers
during
>> the io.
>
>You forgot IO failures: it is essential, once the IO completes, to
>know exactly which higher-level structures completed successfully and
>which did not. The low-level drivers have to have access to the
>independent completion notifications for this to work.
>
No, I didn't forget IO failures; just that I expect the wait structure
containing the wakeup function to be embedded in a cev structure that
contains a pointer to the wait_queue_head field in the higher level
structure. The rest is for the wakeup function to interpret (it can always
access the other fields in the higher level structure - just like
list_entry() does)
Later I realized that instead of having multiple wakeup functions queued on
the low level structures wait queue, its perhaps better to just sort of
turn the cev_wait structure upside down (entry on the lower level
structure's queue should link to the parent entries instead).
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