Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] a few storage topics

[Boaz Harrosh <bharrosh@panasas.com>]

On 01/19/2012 01:22 AM, Jan Kara wrote:
> On Wed 18-01-12 14:58:08, Darrick J. Wong wrote:
>> On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 10:36:48PM +0100, Jan Kara wrote:
>>> On Tue 17-01-12 15:06:12, Mike Snitzer wrote:
>>>> 5) Any more progress on stable pages?
>>>>    - I know Darrick Wong had some proposals, what remains?
>>>   As far as I know this is done for XFS, btrfs, ext4. Is more needed?
>>
>> Yep, it's done for those three fses.
>>
>> I suppose it might help some people if instead of wait_on_page_writeback we
>> could simply page-migrate all the processes onto a new page...?

>   Well, but it will cost some more memory & copying so whether it's faster
> or not pretty much depends on the workload, doesn't it? Anyway I've already
> heard one guy complaining that his RT application does redirtying of mmaped
> pages and it started seeing big latencies due to stable pages work. So for
> these guys migrating might be an option (or maybe fadvise/madvise flag to
> do copy out before submitting for IO?).
> 

OK That one is interesting. Because I'd imagine that the Kernel would not
start write-out on a busily modified page.

Some heavy modifying then a single write. If it's not so then there is already
great inefficiency, just now exposed, but was always there. The "page-migrate"
mentioned here will not help.

Could we not better our page write-out algorithms to avoid heavy contended pages?

Do you have a more detailed description of the workload? Is it theoretically
avoidable?

>> Or possibly modify md-raid5 not to snapshot dirty pages prior to xor/write?
>> (I never really bothered to find out if it really does this.)

md-raid5/1 currently copies all pages if that what you meant.

>   Not sure either. Neil should know :) (added to CC).
> 
> 								Honze

Thanks
Boaz