lkml.org 
[lkml]   [2013]   [Jan]   [7]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
Date
From
SubjectRe: [PATCH v2 1/5] virtio: add functions for piecewise addition of buffers
Il 07/01/2013 01:02, Rusty Russell ha scritto:
> Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com> writes:
>> Il 02/01/2013 06:03, Rusty Russell ha scritto:
>>> Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com> writes:
>>>> The virtqueue_add_buf function has two limitations:
>>>>
>>>> 1) it requires the caller to provide all the buffers in a single call;
>>>>
>>>> 2) it does not support chained scatterlists: the buffers must be
>>>> provided as an array of struct scatterlist;
>>>
>>> Chained scatterlists are a horrible interface, but that doesn't mean we
>>> shouldn't support them if there's a need.
>>>
>>> I think I once even had a patch which passed two chained sgs, rather
>>> than a combo sg and two length numbers. It's very old, but I've pasted
>>> it below.
>>>
>>> Duplicating the implementation by having another interface is pretty
>>> nasty; I think I'd prefer the chained scatterlists, if that's optimal
>>> for you.
>>
>> Unfortunately, that cannot work because not all architectures support
>> chained scatterlists.
>
> WHAT? I can't figure out what an arch needs to do to support this?

It needs to use the iterator functions in its DMA driver.

> All archs we care about support them, though, so I think we can ignore
> this issue for now.

Kind of... In principle all QEMU-supported arches can use virtio, and
the speedup can be quite useful. And there is no Kconfig symbol for SG
chains that I can use to disable virtio-scsi on unsupported arches. :/

Paolo

>> (Also, as you mention chained scatterlists are horrible. They'd happen
>> to work for virtio-scsi, but not for virtio-blk where the response
>> status is part of the footer, not the header).
>
> We lost that debate 5 years ago, so we hack around it as needed. We can
> add helpers to append if we need.



\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2013-01-07 16:01    [W:0.079 / U:0.052 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site