Hi,
On Tue, Feb 06, 2001 at 11:25:00AM -0800, Andre Hedrick wrote:
> On Tue, 6 Feb 2001, Stephen C. Tweedie wrote:
> > No, we simply omit to instruct them to enable write-back caching.
> > Linux assumes that the WCE (write cache enable) bit in a disk's
> > caching mode page is zero.
>
> You can not be so blind to omit the command.
Linux has traditionally ignored the issue. Don't ask me to defend it
--- the last advice I got from anybody who knew SCSI well was that
SCSI disks were defaulting to WCE-disabled.
Note that disabling SCSI WCE doesn't disable the cache, it just
enforces synchronous completion. With tagged command queuing,
writeback caching doesn't necessarily mean a huge performance
increase. But if WCE is being enabled by default on modern SCSI
drives, then that's something which the scsi stack really does need to
fix --- the upper block layers will most definitely break if we have
WCE enabled and we don't set force-unit-access on the scsi commands.
The ll_rw_block interface is perfectly clear: it expects the data to
be written to persistent storage once the buffer_head end_io is
called. If that's not the case, somebody needs to fix the lower
layers.
Cheers,
Stephen
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