Re: Question about REQ_FLUSH and bios with data

From: Steven Whitehouse
Date: Fri Aug 09 2013 - 16:19:31 EST


Hi,

On Fri, 2013-08-09 at 14:09 -0500, scameron@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> So, I'm working on a block driver using the make_request_fn
> interface, and have to handle a bio that comes in with
> (bi_rw & REQ_FLUSH) set AND data to transfer.
>
> According to Documentation/block/writeback_cache_control.txt:
>
> The REQ_FLUSH flag can be OR ed into the r/w flags of a
> bio submitted from the filesystem and will make sure the
> volatile cache of the storage device has been flushed
> before the actual I/O operation is started.
>
> So I've written code that handles that case, along with the
> various error cases I might encounter, I think, which leads
> to my question:
>
> How do I get such a bio with a data transfer AND the REQ_FLUSH bit
> set to come into the driver? Just wondering how to test this case.
>
GFS2 does this... if you look at the log flush code and the function
log_write_header() in particular, you'll see that it sets this on each
log header that gets written. You don't need a cluster to generate this
kind of i/o, just supply mkfs.gfs2 with -p lock_nolock and mount it as a
local filesystem. The combination of touch foo; sync should be enough to
generate a log flush writing a log header with this flag set,

Steve.

> Thanks,
>
> (I cc'ed Tejun Heo just because his name is in block/blk-flush.c)
>
> -- steve
>
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