[PATCH 0/6] power_of_2 emulation support for NVMe ZNS devices

[Javier González]

On 16.03.2022 09:00, Damien Le Moal wrote:
>On 3/15/22 22:05, Javier González wrote:
>>>> The main constraint for (1) PO2 is removed in the block layer, we
>>>> have (2) Linux hosts stating that unmapped LBAs are a problem,
>>>> and we have (3) HW supporting size=capacity.
>>>>
>>>> I would be happy to hear what else you would like to see for this
>>>> to be of use to the kernel community.
>>>
>>> (Added numbers to your paragraph above)
>>>
>>> 1. The sysfs chunksize attribute was "misused" to also represent
>>> zone size. What has changed is that RAID controllers now can use a
>>> NPO2 chunk size. This wasn't meant to naturally extend to zones,
>>> which as shown in the current posted patchset, is a lot more work.
>>
>> True. But this was the main constraint for PO2.
>
>And as I said, users asked for it.

Now users are asking for arbitrary zone sizes.

[...]

>>> 3. I'm happy to hear that. However, I'll like to reiterate the
>>> point that the PO2 requirement have been known for years. That
>>> there's a drive doing NPO2 zones is great, but a decision was made
>>> by the SSD implementors to not support the Linux kernel given its
>>> current implementation.
>>
>> Zone devices has been supported for years in SMR, and I this is a
>> strong argument. However, ZNS is still very new and customers have
>> several requirements. I do not believe that a HDD stack should have
>> such an impact in NVMe.
>>
>> Also, we will see new interfaces adding support for zoned devices in
>> the future.
>>
>> We should think about the future and not the past.
>
>Backward compatibility ? We must not break userspace...

This is not a user API change. If making changes to applications to
adopt new features and technologies is breaking user-space, then the
zoned block device already broke that when we introduced zone capacity.
Any existing zoned application working on ZNS _will have to_ make
changes to support ZNS.