Current partition support of bcache is confusing and buggy. It tries to
trace non-continuous device minor numbers by an ida bit string, and
mistakenly mixed bcache device index with minor numbers. This design
generates several negative results,
- Index of bcache device name is not consecutive under /dev/. If there are
3 bcache devices, they name will be,
/dev/bcache0, /dev/bcache16, /dev/bcache32
Only bcache code indexes bcache device name is such an interesting way.
- First minor number of each bcache device is traced by ida bit string.
One bcache device will occupy 16 bits, this is not a good idea. Indeed
only one bit is enough.
- Because minor number and bcache device index are mixed, a device index
is allocated by ida_simple_get(), but an first minor number is sent into
ida_simple_remove() to release the device. It confused original author
too.
Root cause of the above errors is, bcache code should not handle device
minor numbers at all! A standard process to support multiple partitions in
Linux kernel is,
- Device driver provides major device number, and indexes multiple device
instances.
- Device driver does not allocat nor trace device minor number, only
provides a first minor number of a given device instance, and sets how
many minor numbers (paritions) the device instance may have.
All rested stuffs are handled by block layer code, most of the details can
be found from block/{genhd, partition-generic}.c files.
This patch re-writes multiple partitions support for bcache. It makes
whole things to be more clear, and uses ida bit string in a more efficeint
way.
- Ida bit string only traces bcache device index, not minor number. For a
bcache device with 128 partitions, only one bit in ida bit string is
enough.
- Device minor number and device index are separated in concept. Device
index is used for /dev node naming, and ida bit string trace. Minor
number is calculated from device index and only used to initialize
first_minor of a bcache device.
- It does not follow any standard for 16 partitions on a bcache device.
This patch sets 128 partitions on single bcache device at max, this is
the limitation from GPT (GUID Partition Table) and supported by fdisk.
Considering a typical device minor number is 20 bits width, each bcache
device may have 128 partitions (7 bits), there can be 8192 bcache devices
existing on system. For most common deployment for a single server in
now days, it should be enough.
[minor spelling fixes in commit message by Michael Lyle]
Signed-off-by: Coly Li <colyli@suse.de>
Cc: Eric Wheeler <bcache@lists.ewheeler.net>
Cc: Junhui Tang <tang.junhui@zte.com.cn>
Reviewed-by: Michael Lyle <mlyle@lyle.org>
Signed-off-by: Michael Lyle <mlyle@lyle.org>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
1dbe32ad0a