[dm-devel] Barrier support in device mapper

[Nikanth Karthikesan]

Hi Milan

I was able to talk to Alasdair on Freenode#device-mapper and he is also of the 
opinion full-barrier support is the way to go.

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 12:27 PM, Milan Broz <mbroz at redhat.com> wrote:
> Andi's patch is not complete and I think there can be several problems with 
> it:
>
> - imagine DM device which has barrier support switched on by this simple
> patch and you try to run pvmove on it. How is the barrier request processed
> by underlying devices now?
>
> -> mapping can change online (pvmove, lvextend, lvconvert, ...) to more
> complicated mapping - who reset barrier flag support?
>

I think these things will not create problems.

> - what about stacking devices? Imagine crypto - there is one device per
> table possible under linear target (where you enable barriers by this
> patch).
> dm-crypt will need to implement some queue flushes to properly support
> barriers. Another example - partition mapping over multipath (kpartx), ...
> Are you sure that is it safe with Andi's patch?
> ...

I do not have knowledge of dm-crypt, but yes, dm-crypt might possibly reorder.
Either they should flush the queues or atleast return -EOPNOTSUPP if we need 
to use Andi's patch.

>
> It is dangerous to use that patch IMO, better not support barriers at all
> here. That's why we need something more robust.
>

I understand the possible problems.

> Unfortunately I received _no_ feedback to mentioned RFC barrier patches.

Alasdair said that he will be reviewing/queueing them next week.

Thanks
Nikanth