From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Return-Path: MIME-Version: 1.0 References: <20181030230624.61834-1-evgreen@chromium.org> <1540943443.196084.131.camel@acm.org> In-Reply-To: <1540943443.196084.131.camel@acm.org> From: Evan Green Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2018 11:15:15 -0700 Message-ID: Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/2] loop: Better discard for block devices To: bvanassche@acm.org Cc: axboe@kernel.dk, Gwendal Grignou , asavery@chromium.org, linux-block@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" List-ID: On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 4:50 PM Bart Van Assche wrote: > > On Tue, 2018-10-30 at 16:06 -0700, Evan Green wrote: > > This series addresses some errors seen when using the loop > > device directly backed by a block device. The first change plumbs > > out the correct error message, and the second change prevents the > > error from occurring in many cases. > > Hi Evan, > > Can you provide some information about the use case? Why do you think that > it would be useful to support backing a loop device by a block device? Why > to use the loop driver instead of dm-linear for this use case? > Hi Bart, In our case, the Chrome OS installer uses the loop device to map slices of the disk that will ultimately represent partitions [1]. I believe it has been doing install this way for a very long time, and has been working well. It actually continues to work, but on block devices that don't support discard operations, things are a tiny bit bumpy. This series is meant to smooth out those bumps. As far as I knew this was a supported scenario. -Evan [1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/installer/+/master/chromeos-install