Hi everyone,
My previous message was misformatted, so here's another one. Sorry about
that.
We're currently working on implementing a qemu BDRV format driver which
we are using with virtio-blk devices.
I have a question concerning BDRV request fragmentation and virtio-blk
write request submission which is not entirely clear to me by only
reading virtio spec. Could you please consider the following case and
give some additional guidance?
1. Our BDRV format driver has a notion of max supported transfer size.
So we implement BlockDriver::bdrv_refresh_limits where we fill out
BlockLimits::max_transfer and opt_transfer fields.
2. virtio-blk exposes max_transfer as a virtio_blk_config::opt_io_size
field, which (according to spec 1.1) is a **suggested** maximum. We read
"suggested" as "guest driver may still send requests that don't fit into
opt_io_size and we should handle those"...
3. ... and judging by code in block/io.c qemu block layer handles such
requests by fragmenting them into several BDRV requests if request size
is > max_transfer
4. Guest will see request completion only after all fragments are
handled. However each fragment submission path can call
qemu_coroutine_yield and move on to submitting next request available in
virtq before completely submitting the rest of the fragments. Which
means the following situation is possible where BDRV sees 2 write
requests in virtq, both of which are larger than max_transfer:
Blocks: -----------------------------
Write1: ------xxxxxxxx
Write2: ------yyyyyyyy
Write1Chunk1: xxxx
Write2Chunk1: yyyy
Write2Chunk2: ----yyyy
Write1Chunk1: ----xxxx
Blocks: ------yyyyxxxx-----------------
In above scenario guest virtio-blk driver decided to submit 2
intersecting write requests, both of which are larger than
||max_transfer, and then call hypervisor.
I understand that virtio-blk may handle requests out of order, so guest
must not make any assumptions on relative order in which those requests
will be handled.
However, can guest driver expect that whatever the submission order will
be, the actual intersecting writes will be atomic?
In other words, will it be correct for conforming virtio-blk driver to
expect only "xxxxxxxx" or "yyyyyyyy" but not anything else in between,
after both requests are reported as completed?
Because i think that is something that may happen in qemu right now, if
i understood correctly.
Thanks!