Re: Discard support (was Re: [PATCH] swap: send callback when swap slot is freed)

[Douglas Gilbert <dgilbert@interlog.com>]

Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 10:52:07AM -0500, James Bottomley wrote:
>> However, the enterprise has been doing UNMAP for a while, so we can draw
>> inferences from them since the SSD FTL will operate similarly.  For
>> them, UNMAP is the same cost in terms of time regardless of the number
>> of extents.  The reason is that it's moving the blocks from the global
>> in use list to the global free list.  Part of the problem is that this
>> involves locking and quiescing, so UNMAP ends up being quite expensive
>> to the array but constant in terms of cost (hence they want as few
>> unmaps for as many sectors as possible).
> 
> How are they doing the unmaps?  Using something similar to Mark's wiper
> script and using SG_IO?  Because right now we do not actually implement
> UNMAP support in the kernel.  I'd really love to test the XFS batched
> discard support with a real UNMAP implementation.

The sg3_utils version 1.28 beta at http://sg.danny.cz/sg/
has a new sg_unmap utility and the previous release
included sg_write_same with Unmap bit support.
sg_readcap has been updated to show the TPE and TPRZ bits.

There is a new SCSI GET LBA STATUS command coming
(approved at the last t10 meeting, awaiting the next
SBC-3 draft). That will show the mapped/unmapped
status of logical blocks in a range of LBAs. I can
add a utility for that as well.

Doug Gilbert

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