Please consider the two upstream commits below for the 4.14.y branch.
As a part of an automated test setup, we deploy a disk image into various types of hardware. With the current 4.14.y kernel and certain hardware configurations, the first attempt to write the image to the disk always fails with 'Remote I/O error'. Retrying the exact same command then always succeeds. The second patch below fixes this issue allowing the first attempt to work. It requires the first patch to compile without errors.
commit 425a4dba7953e35ffd096771973add6d2f40d2ed Author: Ilya Dryomov idryomov@gmail.com Date: Mon Oct 16 15:59:09 2017 +0200 block: factor out __blkdev_issue_zero_pages()
commit d5ce4c31d6df518dd8f63bbae20d7423c5018a6c Author: Ilya Dryomov idryomov@gmail.com Date: Mon Oct 16 15:59:10 2017 +0200 block: cope with WRITE ZEROES failing in blkdev_issue_zeroout()