bdi: allow block devices to say that they require stable page writes
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:
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:
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>