Re: MO-Drive under 2.4.3

From: Daniel Kobras (kobras@tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de)
Date: Sat Apr 21 2001 - 19:37:38 EDT

  • Next message: Jes Sorensen: "Re: [parisc-linux] Re: OK, let's try cleaning up another nit. Is anyone paying attention?"

    On Sat, Apr 14, 2001 at 03:29:45PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
    > > > This is a bug in the scsi layer. linux-scsi@vger.kernel.org, not that any of
    > > > the scsi maintainers seem to care about it right now.
    > >
    > > Err..., now I'm confused. Last time this issue popped up, it was my
    > > understanding that it's generic_file_{read,write}'s limitation to filesystems
    > > with logical_blksize >= hw_blksize that makes MOs fail with VFAT. Now, is
    > > this all moot, or is the SCSI thing just an additional problem?
    >
    > generic_file_* doesnt handle metadata issues - its too high up

    As much as SCSI is too low down, so I still don't see why this should be a
    SCSI issue. Assuming requests are no smaller than hw_blksize looks rather sane
    for a low-level driver. It's still enforced in ll_rw_blk(). I'd rather blame
    the callers when they bypass the check via submit_bh().

    More to the topic, FAT in 2.2 contained lots of special code to deal with
    bigblocks. In 2.4, this code got removed in favour of the generic
    functions in fs/buffer.c, to the effect that operations that happen to not
    deref a NULL pointer now request 2k blocks using 512 byte-calculated block
    numbers. I see two options:

    a) Put in lots of bigblock special case code in FAT;
    b) teach submit_bh() or generic_make_request() to transparently reblock
       bhs < hw_blksize and remove most special cases from FAT. Specifically,
       it ought to stop pretending in sb->s_blocksize to use 2k blocks when
       the fs is really tied to 512 byte blocks.

    I tend to favour b), but which one is more likely to be accepted?

    Regards,

    Daniel.

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