Rusty's Bleeding Edge Page

Ever since Jens Axboe's scatterlist chaining patches intruded on my consciousness, they made me uncomfortable. The overloading of lower bits to allow chaining isn't what bothered me, it was how nasty they are to manage: chaining requires an extra padding element, and so you can't do much manipulation with a chained sg handed to you by someone else. This bit the virtio code when I tried to use them.

This, I decided, was one of those places where neat tricks should give way to explicitness: having an exposed two-level structure is easier to understand, debug and manipulate. It also means that new code (struct sg_ring *) is obviously different from unconverted code (struct scatterlist *).

However, when you actually try to do this, you're faced with modifying all the SCSI drivers. Not in a significant way, but changing loops to use different iterators. And after a number of days over the break spend touching those drivers, I understand why Jens chose the approach which placed so little burden on them (even if annoying for everyone else).

It's because these drivers are horrible. Really bad. Clear bugs, non-obvious assumptions and years of neglect. It's certain that converting them in one hit is not feasible, and perhaps any conversion indicates temerity. So at the least, a long-term conversion path is necessary.

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