Simultaneously writing to a sequential zone of a zoned block device
from multiple contexts requires mutual exclusion for BIO issuing to
ensure that writes happen sequentially. However, even for a well
behaved user correctly implementing such synchronization, BIO plugging
may interfere and result in BIOs from the different contextx to be
reordered if plugging is done outside of the mutual exclusion section,
e.g. the plug was started by a function higher in the call chain than
the function issuing BIOs.
Context A Context B
| blk_start_plug()
| ...
| seq_write_zone()
| mutex_lock(zone)
| bio-0->bi_iter.bi_sector = zone->wp
| zone->wp += bio_sectors(bio-0)
| submit_bio(bio-0)
| bio-1->bi_iter.bi_sector = zone->wp
| zone->wp += bio_sectors(bio-1)
| submit_bio(bio-1)
| mutex_unlock(zone)
| return
| -----------------------> | seq_write_zone()
| mutex_lock(zone)
| bio-2->bi_iter.bi_sector = zone->wp
| zone->wp += bio_sectors(bio-2)
| submit_bio(bio-2)
| mutex_unlock(zone)
| <------------------------- |
| blk_finish_plug()
In the above example, despite the mutex synchronization ensuring the
correct BIO issuing order 0, 1, 2, context A BIOs 0 and 1 end up being
issued after BIO 2 of context B, when the plug is released with
blk_finish_plug().
While this problem can be addressed using the blk_flush_plug_list()
function (in the above example, the call must be inserted before the
zone mutex lock is released), a simple generic solution in the block
layer avoid this additional code in all zoned block device user code.
The simple generic solution implemented with this patch is to introduce
the internal helper function blk_mq_plug() to access the current
context plug on BIO submission. This helper returns the current plug
only if the target device is not a zoned block device or if the BIO to
be plugged is not a write operation. Otherwise, the caller context plug
is ignored and NULL returned, resulting is all writes to zoned block
device to never be plugged.
Signed-off-by: Damien Le Moal <damien.lemoal@wdc.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
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