xfs_writepage_map() iterates over the bufferheads on a page to decide
what sort of IO to do and what actions to take. However, when it comes
to reflink and deciding when it needs to execute a COW operation, we no
longer look at the bufferhead state but instead we ignore than and look
up internal state held in the COW fork extent list.
This means xfs_writepage_map() is somewhat confused. It does stuff, then
ignores it, then tries to handle the impedence mismatch by shovelling the
results inside the existing mapping code. It works, but it's a bit of a
mess and it makes it hard to fix the cached map bug that the writepage
code currently has.
To unify the two different mechanisms, we first have to choose a direction.
That's already been set - we're de-emphasising bufferheads so they are no
longer a control structure as we need to do taht to allow for eventual
removal. Hence we need to move away from looking at bufferhead state to
determine what operations we need to perform.
We can't completely get rid of bufferheads yet - they do contain some
state that is absolutely necessary, such as whether that part of the page
contains valid data or not (buffer_uptodate()). Other state in the
bufferhead is redundant:
BH_dirty - the page is dirty, so we can ignore this and just
write it
BH_delay - we have delalloc extent info in the DATA fork extent
tree
BH_unwritten - same as BH_delay
BH_mapped - indicates we've already used it once for IO and it is
mapped to a disk address. Needs to be ignored for COW
blocks.
The BH_mapped flag is an interesting case - it's supposed to indicate that
it's already mapped to disk and so we can just use it "as is". In theory,
we don't even have to do an extent lookup to find where to write it too,
but we have to do that anyway to determine we are actually writing over a
valid extent. Hence it's not even serving the purpose of avoiding a an
extent lookup during writeback, and so we can pretty much ignore it.
Especially as we have to ignore it for COW operations...
Therefore, use the extent map as the source of information to tell us
what actions we need to take and what sort of IO we should perform. The
first step is to have xfs_map_blocks() set the io type according to what
it looks up. This means it can easily handle both normal overwrite and
COW cases. The only thing we also need to add is the ability to return
hole mappings.
We need to return and cache hole mappings now for the case of multiple
blocks per page. We no longer use the BH_mapped to indicate a block over
a hole, so we have to get that info from xfs_map_blocks(). We cache it so
that holes that span two pages don't need separate lookups. This allows us
to avoid ever doing write IO over a hole, too.
Now that we have xfs_map_blocks() returning both a cached map and the type
of IO we need to perform, we can rewrite xfs_writepage_map() to drop all
the bufferhead control. It's also much simplified because it doesn't need
to explicitly handle COW operations. Instead of iterating bufferheads, it
iterates blocks within the page and then looks up what per-block state is
required from the appropriate bufferhead. It then validates the cached
map, and if it's not valid, we get a new map. If we don't get a valid map
or it's over a hole, we skip the block.
At this point, we have to remap the bufferhead via xfs_map_at_offset().
As previously noted, we had to do this even if the buffer was already
mapped as the mapping would be stale for XFS_IO_DELALLOC, XFS_IO_UNWRITTEN
and XFS_IO_COW IO types. With xfs_map_blocks() now controlling the type,
even XFS_IO_OVERWRITE types need remapping, as converted-but-not-yet-
written delalloc extents beyond EOF can be reported at XFS_IO_OVERWRITE.
Bufferheads that span such regions still need their BH_Delay flags cleared
and their block numbers calculated, so we now unconditionally map each
bufferhead before submission.
But wait! There's more - remember the old "treat unwritten extents as
holes on read" hack? Yeah, that means we can have a dirty page with
unmapped, unwritten bufferheads that contain data! What makes these so
special is that the unwritten "hole" bufferheads do not have a valid block
device pointer, so if we attempt to write them xfs_add_to_ioend() blows
up. So we make xfs_map_at_offset() do the "realtime or data device"
lookup from the inode and ignore what was or wasn't put into the
bufferhead when the buffer was instantiated.
The astute reader will have realised by now that this code treats
unwritten extents in multiple-blocks-per-page situations differently.
If we get any combination of unwritten blocks on a dirty page that contain
valid data in the page, we're going to convert them to real extents. This
can actually be a win, because it means that pages with interleaving
unwritten and written blocks will get converted to a single written extent
with zeros replacing the interspersed unwritten blocks. This is actually
good for reducing extent list and conversion overhead, and it means we
issue a contiguous IO instead of lots of little ones. The downside is
that we use up a little extra IO bandwidth. Neither of these seem like a
bad thing given that spinning disks are seek sensitive, and SSDs/pmem have
bandwidth to burn and the lower Io latency/CPU overhead of fewer, larger
IOs will result in better performance on them...
As a result of all this, the only state we actually care about from the
bufferhead is a single flag - BH_Uptodate. We still use the bufferhead to
pass some information to the bio via xfs_add_to_ioend(), but that is
trivial to separate and pass explicitly. This means we really only need
1 bit of state per block per page from the buffered write path in the
writeback path. Everything else we do with the bufferhead is purely to
make the buffered IO front end continue to work correctly. i.e we've
pretty much marginalised bufferheads in the writeback path completely.
Signed-off-By: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
[hch: forward port, refactor and split off bits into other commits]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Reviewed-by: Brian Foster <bfoster@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com>
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
See Documentation/00-INDEX for a list of what is contained in each file.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.
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