Re: Is TRIM/DISCARD going to be a performance problem?

[Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>]

On Mon, May 11 2009, Theodore Tso wrote:
> On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 10:12:16AM +0200, Jens Axboe wrote:
> > 
> > I largely agree with this. I think that trims should be queued and
> > postponed until the drive is largely idle. I don't want to put this IO
> > tracking in the block layer though, it's going to slow down our iops
> > rates for writes. Providing the functionality in the block layer does
> > make sense though, since it sits between that and the fs anyway. So just
> > not part of the generic IO path, but a set of helpers on the side.
> 
> Yes, I agree.  However, in that case, we need two things from the
> block I/O path.  (A) The discard management layer needs a way of
> knowing that the block device has become idle, and (B) ideally there

We don't have to inform of such a condition, the block layer can check
for existing pending trims and kick those off at an appropriate time.

> should be a more efficient method for sending trim requests to the I/O
> submission path.  If we batch the results, when we *do* send the
> discard requests, we may be sending several hundred discards, and it
> would be useful if we could pass into the I/O submission path a linked
> list of regions, so the queue can be drained *once*, and then a whole
> series of discards can be sent to the device all at once.
> 
> Does that make sense to you?

Agree, we definitely only want to do the queue quiesce once for passing
down a series of trims. With the delayed trim queuing, that isn't very
difficult.

-- 
Jens Axboe