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1 I/O Barriers
2 ============
3 Tejun Heo <htejun@gmail.com>, July 22 2005
5 I/O barrier requests are used to guarantee ordering around the barrier
6 requests. Unless you're crazy enough to use disk drives for
7 implementing synchronization constructs (wow, sounds interesting...),
8 the ordering is meaningful only for write requests for things like
9 journal checkpoints. All requests queued before a barrier request
10 must be finished (made it to the physical medium) before the barrier
11 request is started, and all requests queued after the barrier request
12 must be started only after the barrier request is finished (again,
13 made it to the physical medium).
15 In other words, I/O barrier requests have the following two properties.
17 1. Request ordering
19 Requests cannot pass the barrier request. Preceding requests are
20 processed before the barrier and following requests after.
22 Depending on what features a drive supports, this can be done in one
23 of the following three ways.
25 i. For devices which have queue depth greater than 1 (TCQ devices) and
26 support ordered tags, block layer can just issue the barrier as an
27 ordered request and the lower level driver, controller and drive
28 itself are responsible for making sure that the ordering constraint is
29 met. Most modern SCSI controllers/drives should support this.
31 NOTE: SCSI ordered tag isn't currently used due to limitation in the
32 SCSI midlayer, see the following random notes section.
34 ii. For devices which have queue depth greater than 1 but don't
35 support ordered tags, block layer ensures that the requests preceding
36 a barrier request finishes before issuing the barrier request. Also,
37 it defers requests following the barrier until the barrier request is
38 finished. Older SCSI controllers/drives and SATA drives fall in this
39 category.
41 iii. Devices which have queue depth of 1. This is a degenerate case
42 of ii. Just keeping issue order suffices. Ancient SCSI
43 controllers/drives and IDE drives are in this category.
45 2. Forced flushing to physical medium
47 Again, if you're not gonna do synchronization with disk drives (dang,
48 it sounds even more appealing now!), the reason you use I/O barriers
49 is mainly to protect filesystem integrity when power failure or some
50 other events abruptly stop the drive from operating and possibly make
51 the drive lose data in its cache. So, I/O barriers need to guarantee
52 that requests actually get written to non-volatile medium in order.
54 There are four cases,
56 i. No write-back cache. Keeping requests ordered is enough.
58 ii. Write-back cache but no flush operation. There's no way to
59 guarantee physical-medium commit order. This kind of devices can't to
60 I/O barriers.
62 iii. Write-back cache and flush operation but no FUA (forced unit
63 access). We need two cache flushes - before and after the barrier
64 request.
66 iv. Write-back cache, flush operation and FUA. We still need one
67 flush to make sure requests preceding a barrier are written to medium,
68 but post-barrier flush can be avoided by using FUA write on the
69 barrier itself.
72 How to support barrier requests in drivers
73 ------------------------------------------
75 All barrier handling is done inside block layer proper. All low level
76 drivers have to are implementing its prepare_flush_fn and using one
77 the following two functions to indicate what barrier type it supports
78 and how to prepare flush requests. Note that the term 'ordered' is
79 used to indicate the whole sequence of performing barrier requests
80 including draining and flushing.
82 typedef void (prepare_flush_fn)(struct request_queue *q, struct request *rq);
84 int blk_queue_ordered(struct request_queue *q, unsigned ordered,
85 prepare_flush_fn *prepare_flush_fn);
87 @q : the queue in question
88 @ordered : the ordered mode the driver/device supports
89 @prepare_flush_fn : this function should prepare @rq such that it
90 flushes cache to physical medium when executed
92 For example, SCSI disk driver's prepare_flush_fn looks like the
93 following.
95 static void sd_prepare_flush(struct request_queue *q, struct request *rq)
96 {
97 memset(rq->cmd, 0, sizeof(rq->cmd));
98 rq->cmd_type = REQ_TYPE_BLOCK_PC;
99 rq->timeout = SD_TIMEOUT;
100 rq->cmd[0] = SYNCHRONIZE_CACHE;
101 rq->cmd_len = 10;
102 }
104 The following seven ordered modes are supported. The following table
105 shows which mode should be used depending on what features a
106 device/driver supports. In the leftmost column of table,
107 QUEUE_ORDERED_ prefix is omitted from the mode names to save space.
109 The table is followed by description of each mode. Note that in the
110 descriptions of QUEUE_ORDERED_DRAIN*, '=>' is used whereas '->' is
111 used for QUEUE_ORDERED_TAG* descriptions. '=>' indicates that the
112 preceding step must be complete before proceeding to the next step.
113 '->' indicates that the next step can start as soon as the previous
114 step is issued.
116 write-back cache ordered tag flush FUA
117 -----------------------------------------------------------------------
118 NONE yes/no N/A no N/A
119 DRAIN no no N/A N/A
120 DRAIN_FLUSH yes no yes no
121 DRAIN_FUA yes no yes yes
122 TAG no yes N/A N/A
123 TAG_FLUSH yes yes yes no
124 TAG_FUA yes yes yes yes
127 QUEUE_ORDERED_NONE
128 I/O barriers are not needed and/or supported.
130 Sequence: N/A
132 QUEUE_ORDERED_DRAIN
133 Requests are ordered by draining the request queue and cache
134 flushing isn't needed.
136 Sequence: drain => barrier
138 QUEUE_ORDERED_DRAIN_FLUSH
139 Requests are ordered by draining the request queue and both
140 pre-barrier and post-barrier cache flushings are needed.
142 Sequence: drain => preflush => barrier => postflush
144 QUEUE_ORDERED_DRAIN_FUA
145 Requests are ordered by draining the request queue and
146 pre-barrier cache flushing is needed. By using FUA on barrier
147 request, post-barrier flushing can be skipped.
149 Sequence: drain => preflush => barrier
151 QUEUE_ORDERED_TAG
152 Requests are ordered by ordered tag and cache flushing isn't
153 needed.
155 Sequence: barrier
157 QUEUE_ORDERED_TAG_FLUSH
158 Requests are ordered by ordered tag and both pre-barrier and
159 post-barrier cache flushings are needed.
161 Sequence: preflush -> barrier -> postflush
163 QUEUE_ORDERED_TAG_FUA
164 Requests are ordered by ordered tag and pre-barrier cache
165 flushing is needed. By using FUA on barrier request,
166 post-barrier flushing can be skipped.
168 Sequence: preflush -> barrier
171 Random notes/caveats
172 --------------------
174 * SCSI layer currently can't use TAG ordering even if the drive,
175 controller and driver support it. The problem is that SCSI midlayer
176 request dispatch function is not atomic. It releases queue lock and
177 switch to SCSI host lock during issue and it's possible and likely to
178 happen in time that requests change their relative positions. Once
179 this problem is solved, TAG ordering can be enabled.
181 * Currently, no matter which ordered mode is used, there can be only
182 one barrier request in progress. All I/O barriers are held off by
183 block layer until the previous I/O barrier is complete. This doesn't
184 make any difference for DRAIN ordered devices, but, for TAG ordered
185 devices with very high command latency, passing multiple I/O barriers
186 to low level *might* be helpful if they are very frequent. Well, this
187 certainly is a non-issue. I'm writing this just to make clear that no
188 two I/O barrier is ever passed to low-level driver.
190 * Completion order. Requests in ordered sequence are issued in order
191 but not required to finish in order. Barrier implementation can
192 handle out-of-order completion of ordered sequence. IOW, the requests
193 MUST be processed in order but the hardware/software completion paths
194 are allowed to reorder completion notifications - eg. current SCSI
195 midlayer doesn't preserve completion order during error handling.
197 * Requeueing order. Low-level drivers are free to requeue any request
198 after they removed it from the request queue with
199 blkdev_dequeue_request(). As barrier sequence should be kept in order
200 when requeued, generic elevator code takes care of putting requests in
201 order around barrier. See blk_ordered_req_seq() and
202 ELEVATOR_INSERT_REQUEUE handling in __elv_add_request() for details.
204 Note that block drivers must not requeue preceding requests while
205 completing latter requests in an ordered sequence. Currently, no
206 error checking is done against this.
208 * Error handling. Currently, block layer will report error to upper
209 layer if any of requests in an ordered sequence fails. Unfortunately,
210 this doesn't seem to be enough. Look at the following request flow.
211 QUEUE_ORDERED_TAG_FLUSH is in use.
213 [0] [1] [2] [3] [pre] [barrier] [post] < [4] [5] [6] ... >
214 still in elevator
216 Let's say request [2], [3] are write requests to update file system
217 metadata (journal or whatever) and [barrier] is used to mark that
218 those updates are valid. Consider the following sequence.
220 i. Requests [0] ~ [post] leaves the request queue and enters
221 low-level driver.
222 ii. After a while, unfortunately, something goes wrong and the
223 drive fails [2]. Note that any of [0], [1] and [3] could have
224 completed by this time, but [pre] couldn't have been finished
225 as the drive must process it in order and it failed before
226 processing that command.
227 iii. Error handling kicks in and determines that the error is
228 unrecoverable and fails [2], and resumes operation.
229 iv. [pre] [barrier] [post] gets processed.
230 v. *BOOM* power fails
232 The problem here is that the barrier request is *supposed* to indicate
233 that filesystem update requests [2] and [3] made it safely to the
234 physical medium and, if the machine crashes after the barrier is
235 written, filesystem recovery code can depend on that. Sadly, that
236 isn't true in this case anymore. IOW, the success of a I/O barrier
237 should also be dependent on success of some of the preceding requests,
238 where only upper layer (filesystem) knows what 'some' is.
240 This can be solved by implementing a way to tell the block layer which
241 requests affect the success of the following barrier request and
242 making lower lever drivers to resume operation on error only after
243 block layer tells it to do so.
245 As the probability of this happening is very low and the drive should
246 be faulty, implementing the fix is probably an overkill. But, still,
247 it's there.
249 * In previous drafts of barrier implementation, there was fallback
250 mechanism such that, if FUA or ordered TAG fails, less fancy ordered
251 mode can be selected and the failed barrier request is retried
252 automatically. The rationale for this feature was that as FUA is
253 pretty new in ATA world and ordered tag was never used widely, there
254 could be devices which report to support those features but choke when
255 actually given such requests.
257 This was removed for two reasons 1. it's an overkill 2. it's
258 impossible to implement properly when TAG ordering is used as low
259 level drivers resume after an error automatically. If it's ever
260 needed adding it back and modifying low level drivers accordingly
261 shouldn't be difficult.