block: initial patch for on-stack per-task plugging

This patch adds support for creating a queuing context outside
of the queue itself. This enables us to batch up pieces of IO
before grabbing the block device queue lock and submitting them to
the IO scheduler.

The context is created on the stack of the process and assigned in
the task structure, so that we can auto-unplug it if we hit a schedule
event.

The current queue plugging happens implicitly if IO is submitted to
an empty device, yet callers have to remember to unplug that IO when
they are going to wait for it. This is an ugly API and has caused bugs
in the past. Additionally, it requires hacks in the vm (->sync_page()
callback) to handle that logic. By switching to an explicit plugging
scheme we make the API a lot nicer and can get rid of the ->sync_page()
hack in the vm.

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/elevator.h b/include/linux/elevator.h
index 39b68edb388..8857cf9adbb 100644
--- a/include/linux/elevator.h
+++ b/include/linux/elevator.h
@@ -105,6 +105,7 @@ extern void elv_add_request(struct request_queue *, struct request *, int, int);
 extern void __elv_add_request(struct request_queue *, struct request *, int, int);
 extern void elv_insert(struct request_queue *, struct request *, int);
 extern int elv_merge(struct request_queue *, struct request **, struct bio *);
+extern int elv_try_merge(struct request *, struct bio *);
 extern void elv_merge_requests(struct request_queue *, struct request *,
 			       struct request *);
 extern void elv_merged_request(struct request_queue *, struct request *, int);