Re: Some very basic questions

[Eric Anopolsky <erpo41@gmail.com>]

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On Thu, 2008-10-23 at 01:14 +0900, Tejun Heo wrote:
> Ric Wheeler wrote:
> > Waiting for the target to ack an IO is not sufficient, since the target
> > ack does not (with write cache enabled) mean that it is on persistent
> > storage.
> 
> FS waiting for completion of all the dependent writes isn't too good
> latency and throughput-wise tho.  It would be best if FS can indicate
> dependencies between write commands and barrier so that barrier
> doesn't have to empty the whole queue.  Hmm... Can someone tell me how
> much such scheme would help?

The extent of my coding for ZFS on FUSE was in this area. Solaris has a
generic ioctl to flush the write cache on a block device but Linux does
not. I wrote a few routines to detect the type of block device and flush
the cache by talking to the hardware via an ioctl.

Tests with bonnie++ on my laptop showed that throughput and metadata
operations per second were not noticeably affected by completely
flushing the write cache when necessary versus never flushing the write
cache or using any kind of IO barrier.

Caveats:
*Not every HDD is a laptop HDD.
*ZFS on FUSE got average to poor results for metadata operations per
second since it hadn't been optimized for that yet.

Maybe fancier schemes aren't necessary?

Cheers,
Eric


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