Re: remove block layer bounce buffering for MMC

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Wed, Jan 16, 2019 at 2:51 PM Linus Walleij <linus.walleij@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jan 16, 2019 at 11:25 AM Arnd Bergmann <arnd@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Mon, Jan 14, 2019 at 11:27 AM Ulf Hansson <ulf.hansson@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >
> > > +Linus Walleij (recently made a cleanup of the mmc bounce buffering code).
>
> Nah it's not THAT bounce buffer.
>
> > Linus probably knows more here, but I have a vague recollection of
> > the MMC bounce buffer code being needed mostly for performance
> > reasons: when the scatterlist is discontiguous, that can result in
> > a request being split up into separate MMC commands, which due
> > to the lack of queued commands combined with the need for
> > garbage collection on sub-page writes results in a huge slowdown
> > compared to having larger bounce buffers all the time.
> >
> > We had discussed finding a different way to do this (separate
> > from the bounce buffering), but I don't know if that ever happened,
> > or if this is even the code that you are changing here.
>
> Nope not the same code.
>
> The term "bounce buffer" is sadly used as ambigously as
> __underscores in front of function names.
>
> That other "bounce buffer" was first deleted and then
> reimplemented as a local hack in the SDHCI driver core
> after it caused performance regressions on the i.MX and
> some laptops, see commit:
>
> commit bd9b902798ab14d19ca116b10bde581ddff8f905
> mmc: sdhci: Implement an SDHCI-specific bounce buffer
>
> That should be orthogonal to Christoph's changes in this
> patch series.

Ok, thanks for the clarification. Please ignore my comments then.

    Arnd