Discard is advisory, so rounding the requests to alignment
boundaries is never semantically wrong from the data that
the guest sees. But at least the Dell Equallogic iSCSI SANs
has an interesting property that its advertised discard
alignment is 15M, yet documents that discarding a sequence
of 1M slices will eventually result in the 15M page being
marked as discarded, and it is possible to observe which
pages have been discarded.
Between commits 9f1963b and b8d0a980, we converted the block
layer to a byte-based interface that ultimately ignores any
unaligned head or tail based on the driver's advertised
discard granularity, which means that qemu 2.7 refuses to
pass any discard request smaller than 15M down to the Dell
Equallogic hardware. This is a slight regression in behavior
compared to earlier qemu, where a guest executing discards
in power-of-2 chunks used to be able to get every page
discarded, but is now left with various pages still allocated
because the guest requests did not align with the hardware's
15M pages.
Since the SCSI specification says nothing about a minimum
discard granularity, and only documents the preferred
alignment, it is best if the block layer gives the driver
every bit of information about discard requests, rather than
rounding it to alignment boundaries early.
Rework the block layer discard algorithm to mirror the write
zero algorithm: always peel off any unaligned head or tail
and manage that in isolation, then do the bulk of the request
on an aligned boundary. The fallback when the driver returns
-ENOTSUP for an unaligned request is to silently ignore that
portion of the discard request; but for devices that can pass
the partial request all the way down to hardware, this can
result in the hardware coalescing requests and discarding
aligned pages after all.
Reported by: Peter Lieven <pl@kamp.de>
CC: qemu-stable@nongnu.org
Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Max Reitz <mreitz@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com>
3482b9bc41