On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 10:15:34PM -0400, Christoph Hellwig wrote: > On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 05:37:19PM -0600, Matthew Wilcox wrote: > > I think we're going to need to figure out whether we should be sending > > UNMAP or WRITE SAME ... probably need to dive back into the T10 poostorm > > to see what's going on. > > Good question. Latest I had heard was that at least one array vendor > prefers the WRITE SAME. To me it looks like the much saner interface > for the OS, so unless there are arrays that strongly prefer UNMAP or > we need to make use of the multiple extends feature in it I'd go with > WRITE SAME as first choice. I think we're going to see a split in array vendors, tbh. Many were very upset at the thought of taking out multiple extents from the UNMAP command. Which I suggested, because frankly it's insane. > > Jens had some objections to the block layer bits last time I posted > > these. I forget what they were now (this would have been around May > > 2nd, I think). What I've done instead in my current patchset (which > > undoubtedly has bugs because it isn't tested, because I'm not supposed > > to be working on the weekends) is to make sd_prep_fn() call a new method > > in the scsi_host_template. That should translate the discard request > > into a BLOCK_PC ATA_16 command, and we'll all be happy. > > > > It goes a little something like this: > > http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/willy/ssd.git;a=shortlog;h=trim-20090829 > > > > Right now, the test tool is telling me 'Operation not supported', and > > I haven't tried to figure out why yet. > > Queue flag and handling the discard in the prep function is much better > than the prepare function, yes. I don't like the prep_fn callout to the > host a lot. No, but I think we can make it more palatable. Look at the ugly USB hack for accessing near the end of the disc that we have in sd_prep_fn right now. If we can push that into the USB driver, I think that'll make everybody happier. This also gives us an interesting opportunity to experiment with translating read/write commands directly into ATA_16 commands rather than going through the SCSI translation first. That should save a few cycles. > If we go with WRITE SAME as prefered discard option for > scsi translating it to TRIM should be relatively easy, it uses the same > LBA/length encoding as the regular WRITE_16, except that the payload is > just a single sector. That should be not too hard to implement in the > SAT layer. It should avoid the difficulty in translating the command size, true. -- Matthew Wilcox Intel Open Source Technology Centre "Bill, look, we understand that you're interested in selling us this operating system, but compare it to ours. We can't possibly take such a retrograde step." -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
