Re: [PATCH v2 2/2] block: cope with WRITE ZEROES failing in blkdev_issue_zeroout()

[Christoph Hellwig]

On Fri, Oct 06, 2017 at 02:31:20PM +0200, Ilya Dryomov wrote:
> This would unconditionally overwrite any WRITE ZEROS error.  If we get
> e.g. -EIO, and manual zeroing is not allowed, I don't think we want to
> return -EOPNOTSUPP?
> 
> Returning -EOPNOTSUPP to mean "can't zero using either method" doesn't
> make sense to me, because manual zeroing is always supported, just not
> always allowed.

Then thow the throw bdev_write_zeroes_sectors check back in:

        if (ret && try_write_zeroes) {
                if (!(flags & BLKDEV_ZERO_NOFALLBACK))
                        try_write_zeroes = false;
                        goto retry;
                }
                if (!bdev_write_zeroes_sectors(bdev))
                        ret = -EOPNOTSUPP;
        }

The important bit is that the structure in the current patch where the
bdev_write_zeroes_sectors check is on the same level as the method
selection is extremely confusing.