On Tue, Jun 4, 2013 at 11:38 AM, H. Peter Anvin [off-list ref] wrote:

Well, if that is what the block device layer is defined to do then that
is what the block layer does.  It makes sense from the point of view of
a disk, there block layer has to translate and redo, so if the block
layer is defined to do that, why not rely on it?

I'm just hung up on when we can safely mark the array as not dirty.
At a minimum this means raid needs a "I have an ignored-write-failure
in-flight, awaiting retry from upper layer" state.