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Currently, the NBD device does not accept flush requests from the Linux
block layer. If the NBD server opened the target with neither O_SYNC nor
O_DSYNC, however, the device will be effectively backed by a writeback
cache. Without issuing flushes properly, operation of the NBD device will
not be safe against power losses.
The NBD protocol has support for both a cache flush command and a FUA
command flag; the server will also pass a flag to note its support for
these features. This patch adds support for the cache flush command and
flag. In the kernel, we receive the flags via the NBD_SET_FLAGS ioctl,
and map NBD_FLAG_SEND_FLUSH to the argument of blk_queue_flush. When the
flag is active the block layer will send REQ_FLUSH requests, which we
translate to NBD_CMD_FLUSH commands.
FUA support is not included in this patch because all free software
servers implement it with a full fdatasync; thus it has no advantage over
supporting flush only. Because I [Paolo] cannot really benchmark it in a
realistic scenario, I cannot tell if it is a good idea or not. It is also
not clear if it is valid for an NBD server to support FUA but not flush.
The Linux block layer gives a warning for this combination, the NBD
protocol documentation says nothing about it.
The patch also fixes a small problem in the handling of flags: nbd->flags
must be cleared at the end of NBD_DO_IT, but the driver was not doing
that. The bug manifests itself as follows. Suppose you two different
client/server pairs to start the NBD device. Suppose also that the first
client supports NBD_SET_FLAGS, and the first server sends
NBD_FLAG_SEND_FLUSH; the second pair instead does neither of these two
things. Before this patch, the second invocation of NBD_DO_IT will use a
stale value of nbd->flags, and the second server will issue an error every
time it receives an NBD_CMD_FLUSH command.
This bug is pre-existing, but it becomes much more important after this
patch; flush failures make the device pretty much unusable, unlike
Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Alex Bligh <alex@alex.org.uk>
Acked-by: Paul Clements <Paul.Clements@steeleye.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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Christoph Hellwig
Alex Bligh
David Howells