On 1/8/25 11:29 AM, Ming Lei wrote: > On Mon, Jan 06, 2025 at 04:21:18PM +0100, Christoph Hellwig wrote: >> On Mon, Jan 06, 2025 at 07:54:05AM -0700, Jens Axboe wrote: >>> On 1/6/25 7:24 AM, Damien Le Moal wrote: >>>> The first patch implements the new "zloop" zoned block device driver >>>> which allows creating zoned block devices using one regular file per >>>> zone as backing storage. >>> >>> Couldn't we do this with ublk and keep most of this stuff in userspace >>> rather than need a whole new loop driver? >> >> I'm pretty sure we could do that. But dealing with ublk is complete >> pain especially when setting up and tearing it down all the time for >> test, and would require a lot more code, so why? As-is I can directly > > You can link with libublk or add it to rublk, which supports ramdisk zone > already, then install rublk from crates.io directly for setup the > test. Thanks, but memory backing is not what we want. We need to emulate large drives for FS tests (to catch problems such as overflows), and for that, a file based storage backing is better. > Forking one new loop could add much more pain since you may have to address > everything we have fixed for loop, please look at 'git log loop' Which is why Christoph initially started with the kernel driver approach in the first place. To avoid such issues/difficulties. -- Damien Le Moal Western Digital Research
