So, I finally got around to debugging various bcache on md issues, and I ran into a rather sticky problem: bio_alloc() can fail if nr_iovecs > BIO_MAX_PAGES. That itself is not a problem, but then when a bio is cloned it's always done by cloning the _entire_ original bio vec, from 0 to max_vecs - not the range from bi_idx to bi_vcnt. Basically, whenever bcache generates some io internally it uses a single bio to describe the entire io - regardless of whether or not the bio would be too big for the underlying device; it then splits the bio as many times as need be when it's actually submitted. This works beautifully for dumb drivers - I'm actually planning on making my code generic and integrating it with the block layer so that the same approach could be easily used by other code that generates bios, it would allow a _lot_ of code to be deleted from the kernel. But for stacking drivers, the mere existence of a bio with max_vecs > BIO_MAX_PAGES breaks things, regardless of how many pages are actually being used in this bio. So, IMO __bio_clone(), bio_clone_mddev(), and whatever other code ought to be changed to only copy bi_idx to bi_vcnt from the original bio - it'd make it consistent with how bios are used elsewhere. Thoughts? The actual patches should be trivial, it'll mostly just be a matter of grepping around and finding everything, I think. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-bcache" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
