Re: [PATCH v4 00/13] support non power of 2 zoned devices

[Javier González]

On 17.05.2022 10:10, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> I'm a little surprised about all this activity.
>
> I though the conclusion at LSF/MM was that for Linux itself there
> is very little benefit in supporting this scheme.  It will massively
> fragment the supported based of devices and applications, while only
> having the benefit of supporting some Samsung legacy devices.

I believed we had agreed that non-power-of-2 zoned devices was something
to explore. Let me summarize the 3 main points we covered at different
times at LSF/MM:

  - This is not for legacy Samsung ZNS devices. At least 4 other
    vendors have reported building non-power-of-2 ZNS devices to meet
    customer demands on removing holes in the address space. It seems
    like there will be more ZNS devices with size=capacity out there
    than with PO2 sizes. Block device and FS support is very desirable
    for these.

  - We also talked about how the capacity not being a PO2 is the one
    introducing the fragmentation, as applications that already worked
    with SMR HDDs will have to change their data placement policy. The
    size is just a construction, but the real work is adopting the
    capacity.

  - Besides the previous poit, the fragmentation will happen from the
    moment we have available devices. This is not a kernel-only issue.
    We have SMR, ZNS, and soon another spec for zone devices. I
    understood that as long as we do not break any existing support, we
    would be able to expend the zoned ecosystem in Linux.

> So my impression was that this work, while technically feasible, is
> rather useless.  So unless I missed something important I have no
> interest in supporting this in NVMe.

Does the above help you reconsidering your interest in supporting this
in NVMe?