[PATCH] md: support BIO_RW_BARRIER for md/raid1

We can only accept BARRIER requests if all slaves handle
barriers, and that can, of course, change with time....

So we keep track of whether the whole array seems safe for barriers,
and also whether each individual rdev handles barriers.

We initially assumes barriers are OK.

When writing the superblock we try a barrier, and if that fails, we flag
things for no-barriers.  This will usually clear the flags fairly quickly.

If writing the superblock finds that BIO_RW_BARRIER is -ENOTSUPP, we need to
resubmit, so introduce function "md_super_wait" which waits for requests to
finish, and retries ENOTSUPP requests without the barrier flag.

When writing the real raid1, write requests which were BIO_RW_BARRIER but
which aresn't supported need to be retried.  So raid1d is enhanced to do this,
and when any bio write completes (i.e.  no retry needed) we remove it from the
r1bio, so that devices needing retry are easy to find.

We should hardly ever get -ENOTSUPP errors when writing data to the raid.
It should only happen if:
  1/ the device used to support BARRIER, but now doesn't.  Few devices
     change like this, though raid1 can!
or
  2/ the array has no persistent superblock, so there was no opportunity to
     pre-test for barriers when writing the superblock.

Signed-off-by: Neil Brown <neilb@cse.unsw.edu.au>
Signed-off-by: Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/raid/md.h b/include/linux/raid/md.h
index 91467a3c4a52..13e7c4b62367 100644
--- a/include/linux/raid/md.h
+++ b/include/linux/raid/md.h
@@ -89,6 +89,7 @@ extern void md_print_devices (void);
 
 extern void md_super_write(mddev_t *mddev, mdk_rdev_t *rdev,
 			   sector_t sector, int size, struct page *page);
+extern void md_super_wait(mddev_t *mddev);
 extern int sync_page_io(struct block_device *bdev, sector_t sector, int size,
 			struct page *page, int rw);