Commits
Mike Snitzer committed 76e33fe4e2c
dm mpath: reinstate bio-based support Add "multipath-bio" target that offers a bio-based multipath target as an alternative to the request-based "multipath" target -- but in a following commit "multipath-bio" will immediately be replaced by a new "queue_mode" feature for the "multipath" target which will allow bio-based mode to be selected. When DM multipath was originally converted from bio-based to request-based the motivation for the change was better dynamic load balancing (by leveraging block core's request-based IO schedulers, for merging and sorting, _before_ DM multipath would make the decision on where to steer the IO -- based on path load and/or availability). More background is available in this "Request-based Device-mapper multipath and Dynamic load balancing" paper: https://www.kernel.org/doc/ols/2007/ols2007v2-pages-235-244.pdf But we've now come full circle where significantly faster storage devices no longer need IOs to be made larger to drive optimal IO performance. And even if they do there have been changes to the block and filesystem layers that help ensure upper layers are constructing larger IOs. In addition, SCSI's differentiated IO errors will propagate through to bio-based IO completion hooks -- so that eliminates another historic justiciation for request-based DM multipath. Lastly, the block layer's immutable biovec changes have made bio cloning cheaper than it has ever been; whereas request cloning is still relatively expensive (both on a CPU usage and memory footprint level). As such, bio-based DM multipath offers the promise of a more efficient IO path for high IOPs devices that are, or will be, emerging. Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>