On Thu, 17 Jul 2008 07:50:24 -0400 (EDT)
Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com> wrote:

quoted text
> > > > Please give me an example how the boundary restriction of a device can
> > > > break the VMERGE accounting and an IOMMU if you aren't still sure.
> > > 
> > > You have dma_get_seg_boundary and dma_get_max_seg_size. On sparc64, adding 
> > > one of these broken VMERGE accounting (the VMERGE didn't happen past 64-kb 
> > > boundary and bio layer thought that VMERGE would be possible).
> > 
> > If the device has 64KB boundary restriction, the device also has
> > max_seg_size restriction of 64KB or under. So the vmerge acounting
> > works (though we need to fix it to handle max_seg_size, as discussed).
> > 
> > > And if you fix this case, someone will break it again, sooner or later, by 
> > > adding new restriction.
> > 
> > All restrictions that IOMMUs need to know are dma_get_seg_boundary and
> > dma_get_max_seg_size.
> > 
> > What is your new restriction?
> 
> We don't know what happens in the future.

It's very unlikely to add new restrictions.


quoted text
> And that is the problem that we 
> don't know --- but we have two pieces of code (blk-merge and iommu) that 
> try to calculate the same number (number of hw segments) and if they get 
> different result, it will crash. If the calculations were done at one 
> place, there would be no problem with that.

I don't think that your argument, 'the problem that we don't know', is
true.

With the vmerge accounting, we calculate at two places. So if we add
a new restriction, we need to handle it at two places. It's a logical
result.

Of course, it's easier to calculate at one place rather than two
places. But 'we don't know what restriction we will need' isn't a
problem.


BTW, as I've already said, I'm not against removing the vmerge
accounting from the block layer.
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