[PATCH 1/1] nvme: always enable multipath

[John Meneghini]

On 11/22/24 10:39, Keith Busch wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 22, 2024 at 01:09:25PM +0100, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>> On Thu, Nov 21, 2024 at 05:03:21PM -0500, Bryan Gurney wrote:
>>> Since device-mapper multipath will no longer be operating on NVMe
>>> devices, there is no longer a need to set CONFIG_NVME_MULTIPATH=n.
>>>
>>> Always enable NVMe multipath, remove CONFIG_NVME_MULTIPATH, and use
>>> the code paths that would be used if CONFIG_NVME_MULTIPATH=y.
>>
>> As mentioned last round not having to build the not tiny multipath
>> code for embedded systems and other small builds that never require
>> multipathing still seems like a sensible idea.
> 
> It's not just embedded either. I have plenty of single port datacenter
> PCIe NVMe's that claim multi-controller capabilities. I think it's some
> artifact of SRIOV that some versions of the firmware can bring.
> 
> Anyway, we only use the one physical function, so they're certainly not
> multipath devices here. We disable the CONFIG option because while the
> nvme multipath IO overhead is low, it's not zero.

So you're saying you want to keep CONFIG_NVME_MULTIPATH and simply remove the modparam nvme_core.multipath? (I know I said we 
were going to do that but that's before Bryan and I started testing his changes with blktests. I think we can fix that.)

The problem with this solution is: when you build a kernel with CONFIG_NVME_MULTIPATH=n you get exactly the same thing as 
CONFIG_NVME_MULTIPATH=y with nvme_core.multipath=n. You get a separate /dev/nvmeNN entry for every namespace/controller path, 
minus the multipath.c code.

So, I don't see the point. If you really want to stop supporting user space multi-path solutions like DMMP with nvme we need to 
stop creating multiple dev entries for multi-path controllers, no matter what.

Note that this multi-pathing stuff is a part of the confusion in UDEV, like I spoke about at ALPPS this year. One reason why the 
/dev/disk/by-path symlinks are so broken is because the kernel has at least three different ways to configure multi-pathing 
support for nvme devices.

We've been saying we're going to do this since since v5.18.

So how do we want to do this?

-
-		if (!multipath) {
-			dev_warn(ctrl->device,
-				"Found shared namespace %d, but multipathing not supported.\n",
-				info->nsid);
-			dev_warn_once(ctrl->device,
-				"Support for shared namespaces without CONFIG_NVME_MULTIPATH is deprecated and will be removed in Linux 6.0.\n");
-		}

commit ce8d78616a6b637d1b763eb18e32045687a84305
Author: Christoph Hellwig <hch at lst.de>
Date:   Tue Mar 15 13:27:07 2022 +0100

     nvme: warn about shared namespaces without CONFIG_NVME_MULTIPATH

     Start warning about exposing a namespace as multiple block devices,
     and set a fixed deprecation release.

     Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch at lst.de>
     Reviewed-by: Keith Busch <kbusch at kernel.org>

(master) > git name-rev --tags --name-only ce8d78616a6b637d1b763eb18e32045687a84305
nvme-5.18-2022-03-17^0