[dm-devel] [PATCHSET block#for-2.6.36-post] block: replace barrier with sequenced flush

[Christoph Hellwig]

The patchset looks functionally correct to me, and with a small patch
to make use of WRITE_FUA_FLUSH survives xfstests, and instrumenting the
underlying qemu shows that we actually get the flush requests where we should.

No performance or power fail testing done yet.

But I do not like the transition very much.  The new WRITE_FUA_FLUSH
request is exactly what filesystems expect from a current barrier
request, so I'd rather move to that functionality without breaking stuff
inbetween.

So if it was to me I'd keep patches 1, 2, 4 and 5 from your series, than
a main one to relax barrier semantics, then have the renaming patches 7
and 8, and possible keep patch 11 separate from the main implementation
change, and if absolutely also a separate one to introduce REQ_FUA and
REQ_FLUSH in the bio interface, but keep things working while doing
this.

Then we can patches do disable the reiserfs barrier "optimization" as
the very first one, and DM/MD support which I'm currently working on
as the last one and we can start doing the heavy testing.