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![Darrick J. Wong](/assets/img/avatar_default.png)
This patchset ("stable page writes, part 2") makes some key modifications to the original 'stable page writes' patchset. First, it provides creators (devices and filesystems) of a backing_dev_info a flag that declares whether or not it is necessary to ensure that page contents cannot change during writeout. It is no longer assumed that this is true of all devices (which was never true anyway). Second, the flag is used to relaxed the wait_on_page_writeback calls so that wait only occurs if the device needs it. Third, it fixes up the remaining disk-backed filesystems to use this improved conditional-wait logic to provide stable page writes on those filesystems. It is hoped that (for people not using checksumming devices, anyway) this patchset will give back unnecessary performance decreases since the original stable page write patchset went into 3.0. Sorry about not fixing it sooner. Complaints were registered by several people about the long write latencies introduced by the original stable page write patchset. Generally speaking, the kernel ought to allocate as little extra memory as possible to facilitate writeout, but for people who simply cannot wait, a second page stability strategy is (re)introduced: snapshotting page contents. The waiting behavior is still the default strategy; to enable page snapshotting, a superblock flag (MS_SNAP_STABLE) must be set. This flag is used to bandaid^Henable stable page writeback on ext3[1], and is not used anywhere else. Given that there are already a few storage devices and network FSes that have rolled their own page stability wait/page snapshot code, it would be nice to move towards consolidating all of these. It seems possible that iscsi and raid5 may wish to use the new stable page write support to enable zero-copy writeout. Thank you to Jan Kara for helping fix a couple more filesystems. Per Andrew Morton's request, here are the result of using dbench to measure latencies on ext2: 3.8.0-rc3: Operation Count AvgLat MaxLat ---------------------------------------- WriteX 109347 0.028 59.817 ReadX 347180 0.004 3.391 Flush 15514 29.828 287.283 Throughput 57.429 MB/sec 4 clients 4 procs max_latency=287.290 ms 3.8.0-rc3 + patches: WriteX 105556 0.029 4.273 ReadX 335004 0.005 4.112 Flush 14982 30.540 298.634 Throughput 55.4496 MB/sec 4 clients 4 procs max_latency=298.650 ms As you can see, for ext2 the maximum write latency decreases from ~60ms on a laptop hard disk to ~4ms. I'm not sure why the flush latencies increase, though I suspect that being able to dirty pages faster gives the flusher more work to do. On ext4, the average write latency decreases as well as all the maximum latencies: 3.8.0-rc3: WriteX 85624 0.152 33.078 ReadX 272090 0.010 61.210 Flush 12129 36.219 168.260 Throughput 44.8618 MB/sec 4 clients 4 procs max_latency=168.276 ms 3.8.0-rc3 + patches: WriteX 86082 0.141 30.928 ReadX 273358 0.010 36.124 Flush 12214 34.800 165.689 Throughput 44.9941 MB/sec 4 clients 4 procs max_latency=165.722 ms XFS seems to exhibit similar latency improvements as ext2: 3.8.0-rc3: WriteX 125739 0.028 104.343 ReadX 399070 0.005 4.115 Flush 17851 25.004 131.390 Throughput 66.0024 MB/sec 4 clients 4 procs max_latency=131.406 ms 3.8.0-rc3 + patches: WriteX 123529 0.028 6.299 ReadX 392434 0.005 4.287 Flush 17549 25.120 188.687 Throughput 64.9113 MB/sec 4 clients 4 procs max_latency=188.704 ms ...and btrfs, just to round things out, also shows some latency decreases: 3.8.0-rc3: WriteX 67122 0.083 82.355 ReadX 212719 0.005 2.828 Flush 9547 47.561 147.418 Throughput 35.3391 MB/sec 4 clients 4 procs max_latency=147.433 ms 3.8.0-rc3 + patches: WriteX 64898 0.101 71.631 ReadX 206673 0.005 7.123 Flush 9190 47.963 219.034 Throughput 34.0795 MB/sec 4 clients 4 procs max_latency=219.044 ms Before this patchset, all filesystems would block, regardless of whether or not it was necessary. ext3 would wait, but still generate occasional checksum errors. The network filesystems were left to do their own thing, so they'd wait too. After this patchset, all the disk filesystems except ext3 and btrfs will wait only if the hardware requires it. ext3 (if necessary) snapshots pages instead of blocking, and btrfs provides its own bdi so the mm will never wait. Network filesystems haven't been touched, so either they provide their own wait code, or they don't block at all. The blocking behavior is back to what it was before 3.0 if you don't have a disk requiring stable page writes. This patchset has been tested on 3.8.0-rc3 on x64 with ext3, ext4, and xfs. I've spot-checked 3.8.0-rc4 and seem to be getting the same results as -rc3. [1] The alternative fixes to ext3 include fixing the locking order and page bit handling like we did for ext4 (but then why not just use ext4?), or setting PG_writeback so early that ext3 becomes extremely slow. I tried that, but the number of write()s I could initiate dropped by nearly an order of magnitude. That was a bit much even for the author of the stable page series! :) This patch: Creates a per-backing-device flag that tracks whether or not pages must be held immutable during writeout. Eventually it will be used to waive wait_for_page_writeback() if nothing requires stable pages. Signed-off-by: Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com> Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Cc: Adrian Hunter <adrian.hunter@intel.com> Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net> Cc: Artem Bityutskiy <dedekind1@gmail.com> Cc: Joel Becker <jlbec@evilplan.org> Cc: Mark Fasheh <mfasheh@suse.com> Cc: Steven Whitehouse <swhiteho@redhat.com> Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk> Cc: Eric Van Hensbergen <ericvh@gmail.com> Cc: Ron Minnich <rminnich@sandia.gov> Cc: Latchesar Ionkov <lucho@ionkov.net> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
55 lines
1.6 KiB
Text
55 lines
1.6 KiB
Text
What: /sys/class/bdi/<bdi>/
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Date: January 2008
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Contact: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
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Description:
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Provide a place in sysfs for the backing_dev_info object. This allows
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setting and retrieving various BDI specific variables.
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The <bdi> identifier can be either of the following:
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MAJOR:MINOR
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Device number for block devices, or value of st_dev on
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non-block filesystems which provide their own BDI, such as NFS
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and FUSE.
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MAJOR:MINOR-fuseblk
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Value of st_dev on fuseblk filesystems.
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default
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The default backing dev, used for non-block device backed
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filesystems which do not provide their own BDI.
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Files under /sys/class/bdi/<bdi>/
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---------------------------------
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read_ahead_kb (read-write)
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Size of the read-ahead window in kilobytes
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min_ratio (read-write)
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Under normal circumstances each device is given a part of the
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total write-back cache that relates to its current average
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writeout speed in relation to the other devices.
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The 'min_ratio' parameter allows assigning a minimum
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percentage of the write-back cache to a particular device.
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For example, this is useful for providing a minimum QoS.
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max_ratio (read-write)
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Allows limiting a particular device to use not more than the
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given percentage of the write-back cache. This is useful in
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situations where we want to avoid one device taking all or
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most of the write-back cache. For example in case of an NFS
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mount that is prone to get stuck, or a FUSE mount which cannot
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be trusted to play fair.
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stable_pages_required (read-only)
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If set, the backing device requires that all pages comprising a write
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request must not be changed until writeout is complete.
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