[dm-devel] Re: "Enhanced" MD code avaible for review
Jeff Garzik
jgarzik at pobox.com
Tue Mar 30 21:47:47 UTC 2004
Justin T. Gibbs wrote:
>>>That's unfortunate for those using ATA. A command submitted from userland
>>
>>Required, since one cannot know the data phase of vendor-specific commands.
>
>
> So you are saying that this presents an unrecoverable situation?
No, I'm saying that the data phase need not have a bunch of in-kernel
checks, it should be generated correctly from the source.
>>Particularly, checking whether the kernel is doing something wrong, or wrong,
>>just wastes cycles. That's not a scalable way to code... if every driver
>>and Linux subsystem did that, things would be unbearable slow.
>
>
> Hmm. I've never had someone tell me that my SCSI drivers are slow.
This would be noticed in the CPU utilization area. Your drivers are
probably a long way from being CPU-bound.
> I don't think that your statement is true in the general case. My
> belief is that validation should occur where it is cheap and efficient
> to do so. More expensive checks should be pushed into diagnostic code
> that is disabled by default, but the code *should be there*. In any event,
> for RAID meta-data, we're talking about code that is *not* in the common
> or time critical path of the kernel. A few dozen lines of validation code
> there has almost no impact on the size of the kernel and yields huge
> benefits for debugging and maintaining the code. This is even more
> the case in Linux the end user is often your test lab.
It doesn't scale terribly well, because the checks themselves become a
source of bugs.
Jeff
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