Re: patch: aio + bio for raw io

[Benjamin LaHaise]

On Fri, Feb 08, 2002 at 02:54:51PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> bio can handle arbitrarily large IO's, BUT it can never split them. 

I agree that it should not split ios, but it should not needlessly limit 
the size of them either -- that choice should be left to individual 
drivers.

...
> If you are in the small small _small_ minority care about 4MB requests,
> you should build the infrastructure not to make drivers split them, but
> to build up a list of bio's and then submit them all consecutively in
> one go.
> 
> Remember: checking the limits as you build stuff up is easy, and fast. 
> 
> So you should make sure that you never EVER cause anybody to want to
> split a bio. 

Yup.  What we need is an interface for getting the max size of an io -- 
I can see this being needed for filesystems, char devices, network drivers, 
basically anything that we can do aio/"direct" io on.  Given that, I can 
put the split / pipelining code into the generic layer.

		-ben