block: improve handling of the magic discard payload

Instead of allocating a single unused biovec for discard requests, send
them down without any payload.  Instead we allow the driver to add a
"special" payload using a biovec embedded into struct request (unioned
over other fields never used while in the driver), and overloading
the number of segments for this case.

This has a couple of advantages:

 - we don't have to allocate the bio_vec
 - the amount of special casing for discard requests in the block
   layer is significantly reduced
 - using this same scheme for other request types is trivial,
   which will be important for implementing the new WRITE_ZEROES
   op on devices where it actually requires a payload (e.g. SCSI)
 - we can get rid of playing games with the request length, as
   we'll never touch it and completions will work just fine
 - it will allow us to support ranged discard operations in the
   future by merging non-contiguous discard bios into a single
   request
 - last but not least it removes a lot of code

This patch is the common base for my WIP series for ranges discards and to
remove discard_zeroes_data in favor of always using REQ_OP_WRITE_ZEROES,
so it would be good to get it in quickly.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/bio.h b/include/linux/bio.h
index b153239..7cf8a6c 100644
--- a/include/linux/bio.h
+++ b/include/linux/bio.h
@@ -197,8 +197,9 @@ static inline unsigned bio_segments(struct bio *bio)
 	switch (bio_op(bio)) {
 	case REQ_OP_DISCARD:
 	case REQ_OP_SECURE_ERASE:
-	case REQ_OP_WRITE_SAME:
 	case REQ_OP_WRITE_ZEROES:
+		return 0;
+	case REQ_OP_WRITE_SAME:
 		return 1;
 	default:
 		break;