• Christoph Hellwig's avatar
    block: remove support for the host aware zone model · 7437bb73
    Christoph Hellwig authored
    When zones were first added the SCSI and ATA specs, two different
    models were supported (in addition to the drive managed one that
    is invisible to the host):
    
     - host managed where non-conventional zones there is strict requirement
       to write at the write pointer, or else an error is returned
     - host aware where a write point is maintained if writes always happen
       at it, otherwise it is left in an under-defined state and the
       sequential write preferred zones behave like conventional zones
       (probably very badly performing ones, though)
    
    Not surprisingly this lukewarm model didn't prove to be very useful and
    was finally removed from the ZBC and SBC specs (NVMe never implemented
    it).  Due to to the easily disappearing write pointer host software
    could never rely on the write pointer to actually be useful for say
    recovery.
    
    Fortunately only a few HDD prototypes shipped using this model which
    never made it to mass production.  Drop the support before it is too
    late.  Note that any such host aware prototype HDD can still be used
    with Linux as we'll now treat it as a conventional HDD.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarChristoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarMartin K. Petersen <martin.petersen@oracle.com>
    Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20231217165359.604246-4-hch@lst.deSigned-off-by: default avatarJens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
    7437bb73
dm-table.c 53.6 KB