[PATCH, RFC] xfs: batched discard support

[Ric Wheeler]

On 08/19/2009 09:39 PM, Mark Lord wrote:
> [resending, after fixing the Cc: list; somebody trimmed it earlier]
>
> Jamie Lokier wrote:
> ..
>> I don't remember - does TRIM guarantee the blocks read zeros afterwards?
> ..
>
> No, it doesn't.
>
> A drive can optionally support "deterministic TRIM", whereby it will 
> return
> consistent data for any given trimmed sector afterwards, but that 
> doesn't mean zeros.
>
> -ml

Note that returning consistent data is critical for devices that are 
used in a RAID group since you will need each RAID block that is used to 
compute the parity to continue to return the same data until you 
overwrite it with new data :-)

If we have a device that does not support this (or is misconfigured not 
to do this), we should not use those devices in an MD group & do discard 
against it...

ric