Re: [PATCH v9 06/10] ata: zpodd: check zero power ready status

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On Monday, November 19, 2012 03:06:51 PM James Bottomley wrote:
> On Mon, 2012-11-19 at 06:56 -0800, Tejun Heo wrote:
> > Hey, Aaron.
> > 
> > On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 11:09:40AM +0800, Aaron Lu wrote:
> > > > What I'm confused about is what autopm does for devices w/o zpodd.
> > > > What happens then?  Is it gonna leave power on for the device and,
> > > > say, go on to suspend the controller?  But, how would that work for,
> > > > say, future devices with async notification for media events?
> > > 
> > > Maybe we shouldn't allow autopm for such devices?
> > 
> > Yeah, maybe.  It would be nice to be able to automatically power off
> > disks and ports which aren't being used tho.
> > 
> > > > That said, I can't say the snooping is pretty.  It's a rather nasty
> > > > thing to do.  So, libata now wants information from the event polling
> > > > in block layer, but reaching for block_device from ata_devices is
> > > > nasty too.  Hmmm... but aren't you already doing that to block polling
> > > > on a powered down device?
> > > 
> > > I was feeling brain damaged by this for some time :-)
> > > 
> > > Basically, only ATA layer is aware of the power off thing, and sr knows
> > > nothing about this(or it is not supposed to know this, at least, this is
> > > what SCSI people think) and once powered off, I do not want the poll to
> > > disturb the device, so I need to block the poll. I can't come up with
> > > another way to achieve this except this nasty way.
> > > 
> > > James suggests me to keep the poll, but emulate the command. The problem
> > > with this is, the autopm for resume will kick in on each poll, so I'll
> > > need to decide if power up the ODD for this time's resume is needed in
> > > port's runtime resume callback. This made things complex and it also put
> > > too much logic in the resume callback, which is not desired. And even if
> > > I keep the ODD in powered off state by emulating this poll command, its
> > > ancestor devices will still be resumed, and I may need to do some trick
> > > in their resume callback to avoid needless power/state transitions. This
> > > doesn't feel like an elegant way to solve this either.
> > > 
> > > So yes, I'm still using this _nasty_ way to make the ODD stay in powered
> > > off state as long as possible. But if there is other elegant ways to
> > > solve this, I would appreciate it and happily using it. Personally, I
> > > hope we can make sr aware of ZPODD, that would make the pain gone.
> > 
> > I really think we need a way for (auto)pm and event polling to talk to
> > each other so that autopm can tell event poll to sod off while pm is
> > in effect.  Trying to solve this from inside libata doesn't seem
> > right.  The problem, again, seems to be figuring out which hardware
> > device maps to which block device.  Hmmm... Any good ideas?
> 
> I've asked the PM people several times about this, because it's a real
> problem for almost everything:  PM needs some type of top to bottom
> stack view, which the layering isolation we have within storage really
> doesn't cope with well.  No real suggestion has been forthcoming.

Actually, I think that the particular case in question is really special
and the fact that there's the pollig loop that user space is involved in
doesn't make things more stratightforward.

And PM really doesn't need to see things top to bottom, but the polling
needs to know what happens in the PM land.  We need to be able to tell it
"from now on tell user space that there are no events here".  The question
is where to put that information so that it's accessible to all parts of the
stack involved.

> The reason I think it should be emulated (in the acpi layer, not libata,
> but as long as it's not in SCSI, I'm not so fussed where it ends up) is
> because ZPODD is the software equivalent of ZPREADY, which will be done
> in hardware and will be effectively invisible to autopm in the same way
> that SCSI (and ATA) power management is mostly invisible.  If we
> currently do ZPREADY emulation in the low layer (i.e. ZPODD has exact
> ZPREADY emulation), we won't care (except for flipping the sofware bit)
> whether the device support ZPODD or ZPREADY and it will all just
> work(tm).  The industry expectation is that ZPODD is just a transition
> state between current power management and ZPREADY.

Well, if you poll a ZPREADY-capable drive, it will go off and on in cycles
transparently, but still it won't save as much energy as it can.  We'll need
to do something about the polling in that case too, it seems.

Thanks,
Rafael


-- 
I speak only for myself.
Rafael J. Wysocki, Intel Open Source Technology Center.
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