Request Queues

Block devices maintain request queues to store their pending block I/O requests. The request queue is represented by the request_queue structure and is defined in <linux/blkdev.h>. The request queue contains a doubly linked list of requests and associated control information. Requests are added to the queue by higher-level code in the kernel, such as filesystems. As long as the request queue is nonempty, the block device driver associated with the queue grabs the request from the head of the queue and submits it to its associated block device. Each item in the queue's request list is a single request, of type struct request.

Requests

Individual requests on the queue are represented by struct request, which is also defined in <linux/blkdev.h>. Each request can be composed of more than one bio structure because individual requests can operate on multiple consecutive disk blocks. Note that although the blocks on the disk must be adjacent, the blocks in memory need not beeach bio structure can describe multiple segments (recall, segments are contiguous chunks of a block in memory) and the request can be composed of multiple bio structures.