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

[Keith Busch]

On Thu, Mar 10, 2022 at 02:58:07PM +0000, Matias Bjørling wrote:
>  >> Yes, these drives are intended for Linux users that would use the
> > >> zoned block device. Append is supported but holes in the LBA space
> > >> (due to diff in zone cap and zone size) is still a problem for these users.
> > >
> > > With respect to the specific users, what does it break specifically? What are
> > key features are they missing when there's holes?
> > 
> > What we hear is that it breaks existing mapping in applications, where the
> > address space is seen as contiguous; with holes it needs to account for the
> > unmapped space. This affects performance and and CPU due to unnecessary
> > splits. This is for both reads and writes.
> > 
> > For more details, I guess they will have to jump in and share the parts that
> > they consider is proper to share in the mailing list.
> > 
> > I guess we will have more conversations around this as we push the block
> > layer changes after this series.
> 
> Ok, so I hear that one issue is I/O splits - If I assume that reads
> are sequential, zone cap/size between 100MiB and 1GiB, then my gut
> feeling would tell me its less CPU intensive to split every 100MiB to
> 1GiB of reads, than it would be to not have power of 2 zones due to
> the extra per io calculations. 

Don't you need to split anyway when spanning two zones to avoid the zone
boundary error?

Maybe this is a silly idea, but it would be a trivial device-mapper
to remap the gaps out of the lba range.