On 2016-09-16 12:21, James Bottomley wrote:
On Fri, 2016-09-16 at 11:53 -0400, Austin S. Hemmelgarn wrote:
On 2016-09-16 07:16, Hannes Reinecke wrote:
On 09/15/2016 10:52 PM, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote:
Hi Martin,
On Thu, Sep 15, 2016 at 6:07 PM, Martin K. Petersen
But how do they signal that ATA passthrough is possible? Is
there an ATA Information VPD page? Is REPORT SUPPORTED
OPERATION CODES supported?
We need really solid discovery data before we can entertain
enabling something like this.
`sg_opcodes` said invalid request, so I think there isn't REPORT
SUPPORTED OPERATION CODES, and `sg_vpd -p ai` came up illegal
too.
However, sg_sat_identify worked reliably, which means a solid way
of probing this would be to send IDENTIFY DEVICE ATA via
SG_ATA_16 or SG_ATA_12.
Let me know and I can give you access to the hardware if you're
curious.
Sadly, that's not sufficient.
linux is not the only provider of an SATL (mpt3sas being the most
prominent other one).
And while they might support ATA_12/ATA_16, there is no indication
that you can pass DSM TRIM that way.
So it's better to not support it at all than to support it on
hardware we can reliably identify?
I get that having feature parity is a good thing, but the discussion
isn't about providing support for all SATL devices, it's specifically
about UAS connected SATL devices. Last I checked, mpt3sas doesn't do
anything with UAS, which means it's kind of irrelevant WRT supporting
this for UAS devices.
We're getting a bit off topic on mptsas and it's eccentric SATL.
The point is, you're asking for UAS devices which each have an internal
SATL which you say potentially doesn't support discard. The three
problems we have are
1. How do we identify if the UAS SATL doesn't support discard. If it
does, we really don't want to cause further SATL related issues by
bypassing it, so we need a way of telling this.
2. If the SATL doesn't support discard, will it reliably support the
ATA_12 or ATA_16 pass through (and which one) .. we need a way of
checking this because there are known SATLs that don't do pass
through.
3. How do we actually configure it? Presumably if the SATL doesn't
support discard, it also doesn't give us the useful mode page
indications we use to configure TRIM, so we're going to have to do
some pass through discovery as well.
I assume by 'discard' here you're referring to SCSI UNMAP, as anything
that supports ATA_12 or ATA_16 pass through correctly will support ATA
TRIM/DISCARD on drives that support it. If that's the case, then:
1. If SCSI UNMAP fails, it doesn't support UNMAP. This is of course
non-trivial to verify safely (we pretty much have to assume it is
supported if we have no clear indication it isn't, and then switch based
on what happens the first time we try to use it).
2. Unless there are SATL's out there that write garbage to the device or
die when sent an ATA_12 or ATA_16 pass through command encapsulating an
ATA DEVICE IDENTIFY command, this isn't an issue. Even if such SATL's
exist, they can easily be blacklisted.
3. This isn't hard, a SATL which actually supports ATA pass through will
almost always pass through the mode page unmodified.
On the note of UAS SATL's, all of them that I've seen fall into one of
four categories:
1. Supports one or both of ATA_12 or ATA_16 pass through, and supports
passing through ATA TRIM/DISCARD, but not SCSI UNMAP.
2. Supports one of ATA_12 or ATA_16 pass through, and does not support
passing through ATA TRIM/DISCARD or translating SCSI UNMAP. All devices
I've seen that fit this will modify the ATA DEVICE IDENTIFY data so it
doesn't report DISCARD support, or will simply return an error for
DISCARD requests. I haven't seen any like this that were manufactured
after UAS became standardized.
3. Supports neither ATA_12 or ATA_16 pass through, and doesn't support
UNMAP.
4. Like type 1, except it supports both pass through commands, and also
properly translates SCSI UNMAP commands (I've only ever seen one of
these, have no idea what chipset it had, and it was insanely expensive
(upside of 300 USD)).
All we really can do anything about is category 1. Category 4 works
with the current drivers, and we can't properly support it on category 2
or 3. All three devices I have right now are in category 1, I know a
number of other people in a similar situation, and it sounds like Jason
has at least one such device as well. Given that Windows does this
(I've confirmed this with a hardware USB analyzer I borrowed from a
friend), and that I've not seen anything since the UAS spec was actually
released that falls into category 2 (and if I understand the spec
correctly, such a device is actually not compliant with it anyway), I
think it's probably safe to do this in Linux and just base the check on:
1. UAS (not some other SCSI transport) without UNMAP support.
2. Supports ATA_12 or ATA_16 pass through.
3. ATA DEVICE IDENTIFY via SAT indicates that the device supports
DISCARD/TRIM.
Then we'd be matching behavior on Windows, and should probably be
relatively safe.
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