[Xen-devel] xenidc based blkback

[Harry Butterworth <harry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have spent a week trying to work out how to shrink the USB code and
how to better integrate the xenidc code with the Xen tree.

As part of this I've done a sketchy port of the blkback driver to
xenidc.  I thought I'd post it to the list just in case anyone was
interested in having a look.

It turns out that the significant difference between usbback and blkback
from the xenidc point of view is that the blkback driver implements
scatter gather support as a zero copy optimisation whereas the usb
driver doesn't (the linux USB stack requires contiguous buffers so there
is no point for USB).

To maintain the current zero copy blkback implementation xenidc needs to
be extended with a scatter gather remote buffer reference type and I've
assumed this exists for the blkback code below.

Split drivers using the xenidc rbr_mapper_pool will have to pass a
parameter indicating whether they are scatter gather capable. The pool
will map scatter gather remote buffer references as scatter gather local
buffers for drivers which are capable.  Conceptually, if a front-end
sent a scatter gather remote buffer reference to a non-capable back-end
driver the pool would be required to stage the data into a contiguous
region.

The I/O processing and data transfer/bio creation part of the code below
is complete aside from a few FIXMEs (blkback2_resource.c) but the
configuration and setup code (blkback2_device.c) is incomplete because
I'm simultaneously trying to work out what to do about the
xenbus<->driver interface which takes 300 loc to pass two parameters to
the blkback/usbback drivers.  I'm experimenting with a different xenbus
interface which looks a bit more promising but isn't concrete yet.

I've managed to cut the usbback code by about half by removing the
ability to have more than one port per device (you can have more than
one device which gives equivalent functionality) and by factoring out
some code which was common between the xenbus based usbback and blkback
drivers into the somewhat sketchy new xenbus API.

There is still some commonality between the xenidc based blkback and
newly shrunken usbback code.  This might perhaps be expressed as a base
device class from which the usb and blk specific stuff could be derived.
The common code is only about 25% and fairly simple though so this might
not be a net readability win.

In passing, I happened to notice that the real blkback code drops error
values on intermediate bio completion which makes it unsafe during
back-end I/O errors.  The fix is to check the uptodate bit in the bio
flags.

Enjoy the conference.

Harry.

xenidc-based-blkback.tar.bz2
Description: application/bzip-compressed-tar

_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel