The minimal size of request in the block framework is always PAGE_SIZE.
It means that when 64KB guest is support, the request will at least be
64KB.
Although, if the backend doesn't support indirect descriptor (such as QDISK
in QEMU), a ring request is only able to accommodate 11 segments of 4KB
(i.e 44KB).
The current frontend is assuming that an I/O request will always fit in
a ring request. This is not true any more when using 64KB page
granularity and will therefore crash during boot.
On ARM64, the ABI is completely neutral to the page granularity used by
the domU. The guest has the choice between different page granularity
supported by the processors (for instance on ARM64: 4KB, 16KB, 64KB).
This can't be enforced by the hypervisor and therefore it's possible to
run guests using different page granularity.
So we can't mandate the block backend to support indirect descriptor
when the frontend is using 64KB page granularity and have to fix it
properly in the frontend.
The solution exposed below is based on modifying directly the frontend
guest rather than asking the block framework to support smaller size
(i.e < PAGE_SIZE). This is because the change is the block framework are
not trivial as everything seems to relying on a struct *page (see [1]).
Although, it may be possible that someone succeed to do it in the future
and we would therefore be able to use it.
Given that a block request may not fit in a single ring request, a
second request is introduced for the data that cannot fit in the first
one. This means that the second ring request should never be used on
Linux if the page size is smaller than 44KB.
To achieve the support of the extra ring request, the block queue size
is divided by two. Therefore, the ring will always contain enough space
to accommodate 2 ring requests. While this will reduce the overall
performance, it will make the implementation more contained. The way
forward to get better performance is to implement in the backend either
indirect descriptor or multiple grants ring.
Note that the parameters blk_queue_max_* helpers haven't been updated.
The block code will set the mimimum size supported and we may be able
to support directly any change in the block framework that lower down
the minimal size of a request.
[1] http://lists.xen.org/archives/html/xen-devel/2015-08/msg02200.html
Signed-off-by: Julien Grall <julien.grall@citrix.com>
Acked-by: Roger Pau Monné <roger.pau@citrix.com>
Signed-off-by: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
6cc5683390