[Cluster-devel] [PATCH v2] gfs2: add flag REQ_PRIO for metadata I/O

[Bob Peterson <rpeterso@redhat.com>]

From: Coly Li <colyli@suse.de>

When gfs2 does metadata I/O, only REQ_META is used as a metadata hint of
the bio. But flag REQ_META is just a hint for block trace, not for block
layer code to handle a bio as metadata request.

For some of metadata I/Os of gfs2, A REQ_PRIO flag on the metadata bio
would be very informative to block layer code. For example, if bcache is
used as a I/O cache for gfs2, it will be possible for bcache code to get
the hint and cache the pre-fetched metadata blocks on cache device. This
behavior may be helpful to improve metadata I/O performance if the
following requests hit the cache.

Here are the locations in gfs2 code where a REQ_PRIO flag should be added,
- All places where REQ_READAHEAD is used, gfs2 code uses this flag for
  metadata read ahead.
- In gfs2_meta_rq() where the first metadata block is read in.
- In gfs2_write_buf_to_page(), read in quota metadata blocks to have them
  up to date.
These metadata blocks are probably to be accessed again in future, adding
a REQ_PRIO flag may have bcache to keep such metadata in fast cache
device. For system without a cache layer, REQ_PRIO can still provide hint
to block layer to handle metadata requests more properly.

Signed-off-by: Coly Li <colyli@suse.de>
Cc: Eric Wheeler <bcache@linux.ewheeler.net>
Cc: Bob Peterson <rpeterso@redhat.com>
Cc: Steven Whitehouse <swhiteho@redhat.com>
---
Hi,

Thanks. This is now applied to the for-next branch of the linux-gfs2 tree:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/gfs2/linux-gfs2.git/commit/fs/gfs2?h=for-next&id=e477b24b507998bc6568316a2e034025960d2404

Regards,

Bob Peterson
Red Hat File Systems