Re: Ext4: batched discard support

[Mark Lord <kernel@teksavvy.com>]

On 19/04/10 12:20 PM, Greg Freemyer wrote:
> Adding Mark Lord in cc.
..
> On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 6:55 AM, Lukas Czerner<lczerner@redhat.com>  wrote:
..
>> The basic idea behind my discard support is to create an ioctl which
>> walks through all the free extents in each allocating group and discard
>> those extents. As an addition to improve its performance one can specify
>> minimum free extent length, so ioctl will not bother with shorter extents.
..

Perfect.  I proposed exactly this last year, but never found time to work it further.
Please proceed with it!

..
>> But you may notice, that there is one problem. bb_bitmap_deleted does
>> not survive umount. To bypass the problem the first ioctl call have to
>> walk through whole file system trimming all free extents. But there is a
>> better solution to this problem. The bb_bitmap_deleted can be stored on
>> disk an can be restored in mount time along with other bitmaps, but I
>> think it is a quite big change and should be discussed further.
..

That's not necessary.  It is a simple matter to TRIM a clean filesystem
before it is mounted R/W during the boot sequence.  No new information
is required for that operation.

My wiper.sh script already shows walking the freelists and trimming all
available space, something which takes only a couple of seconds on a 120GB
filesystem that has not been kept up-to-date with on-the-fly trim.

Cheers