Normally these two flags do go together, as the issuer of polled IO generally cannot wait for resources that will get freed as part of IO completion. This is because that very task is the one that will complete the request and free those resources, hence that would introduce a deadlock. But it is possible to have someone else issue the polled IO, eg via io_uring if the request is punted to io-wq. For that case, it's fine to have the task block on IO submission, as it is not the same task that will be completing the IO. It's completely up to the caller to ask for both polled and nowait IO separately! If we don't allow polled IO where IOCB_NOWAIT isn't set in the kiocb, then we can run into repeated -EAGAIN submissions and not make any progress. Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@xxxxxxxxx> --- include/linux/bio.h | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/include/linux/bio.h b/include/linux/bio.h index c4f5b5228105..11984ed29cb8 100644 --- a/include/linux/bio.h +++ b/include/linux/bio.h @@ -791,7 +791,7 @@ static inline int bio_integrity_add_page(struct bio *bio, struct page *page, static inline void bio_set_polled(struct bio *bio, struct kiocb *kiocb) { bio->bi_opf |= REQ_POLLED; - if (!is_sync_kiocb(kiocb)) + if (kiocb->ki_flags & IOCB_NOWAIT) bio->bi_opf |= REQ_NOWAIT; } -- 2.40.1