Re: [PATCH] virtio_blk: Add support for lifetime feature

From: Christoph Hellwig
Date: Thu Apr 15 2021 - 11:55:42 EST


On Mon, Apr 12, 2021 at 08:00:24AM -0400, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 12, 2021 at 10:42:17AM +0100, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > A note to the virtio committee: eMMC is the worst of all the currently
> > active storage standards by a large margin. It defines very strange
> > ad-hoc interfaces that expose very specific internals and often provides
> > very poor abstractions.
>
> Are we talking about the lifetime feature here? UFS has it too right?

Ok, the wide margin above ignores UFS, which has a lot of the same
issues as EMMC, just a little less cruft.

> It's not too late to
> change things if necessary... it would be great if you could provide
> more of the feedback on this on the TC mailing list.

I think the big main issue here is that it just forwards an awkwardly
specific concept through virtio. If we want a virtio feature it really
needs to stand a lone and be properly documented without referring to
external specifications that are not openly available.

> > It would be great it you could reach out to the
> > wider storage community before taking bad ideas from the eMMC standard
> > and putting it into virtio.
>
> Noted. It would be great if we had more representation from the storage
> community ... meanwhile what would a good forum for this be?
> linux-block@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ?

At least for linux, yes.