[dm-devel] [PATCH] block: add a bi_error field to struct bio

[Jens Axboe]

On 07/20/2015 07:29 AM, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> Currently we have two different ways to signal an I/O error on a BIO:
>
>   (1) by clearing the BIO_UPTODATE flag
>   (2) by returning a Linux errno value to the bi_end_io callback
>
> The first one has the drawback of only communicating a single possible
> error (-EIO), and the second one has the drawback of not beeing persistent
> when bios are queued up, and are not passed along from child to parent
> bio in the ever more popular chaining scenario.  Having both mechanisms
> available has the additional drawback of utterly confusing driver authors
> and introducing bugs where various I/O submitters only deal with one of
> them, and the others have to add boilerplate code to deal with both kinds
> of error returns.
>
> So add a new bi_error field to store an errno value directly in struct
> bio and remove the existing mechanisms to clean all this up.

I think this is a good change, the only part I _really_ dislike is that 
this now bumps a struct bio from 2 cache lines to 3. Have you done any 
perf testing?

-- 
Jens Axboe