Re: Is there a reason why REQ_OP_READ has to be 0?

From: Jens Axboe
Date: Mon Jan 16 2023 - 11:10:36 EST


On 1/16/23 9:04?AM, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 16, 2023 at 04:01:50PM +0000, David Howells wrote:
>> Hi Jens, Christoph,
>>
>> Do you know if there's a reason why REQ_OP_READ has to be 0? I'm seeing a
>> circumstance where a direct I/O write on a blockdev is BUG'ing in my modified
>> iov_iter code because the iterator says it's a source iterator (correct), but
>> the bio->bi_opf == REQ_OP_READ (which should be wrong).
>>
>> I thought I'd move REQ_OP_READ to, say, 4 so that I could try and see if it's
>> just undefined but the kernel BUGs and then panics during boot.
>
> There's all kind of assumptions of that from basically day 1 of
> Linux. The most obvious one is in op_is_write, but I'm pretty sure
> there are more hidden somewhere.

I didn't get this original email...

I would not change this frivilously, as Christoph says we've used 0/1
for basic read/write data direction since basically forever. So for all
intents and purposes, yes that is basically hardwired.

--
Jens Axboe