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From: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
To: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>, Andreas Dilger <adilger@dilger.ca>,
	"linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
	"linux-mm@kvack.org" <linux-mm@kvack.org>,
	"linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org" <linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Latency writing to an mlocked ext4 mapping
Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2011 21:17:07 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20111102201707.GD31575@quack.suse.cz> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CALCETrWNCy0VN-rQM-xPksiJ50DW-KM+w2NBprNOPhvnizZW=Q@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue 01-11-11 18:51:04, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 1, 2011 at 4:10 PM, Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net> wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 1, 2011 at 4:03 PM, Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> wrote:
> >> Avoiding IO during a minor fault would be a decent thing which might be
> >> worth pursuing. As you properly noted "stable pages during writeback"
> >> requirement is one obstacle which won't be that trivial to avoid though...
> >
> > There's an easy solution that would be good enough for me: add a mount
> > option to turn off stable pages.
> >
> > Is the other problem just a race, perhaps?  __block_page_mkwrite calls
> > __block_write_begin (which calls get_block, which I think is where the
> > latency comes from) *before* wait_on_page_writeback, which means that
> > there might not be any space allocated yet.
> 
> I think I'm right (other than calling it a race).  If I change my code to do:
> 
> - map the file (with MCL_FUTURE set)
> - fallocate
> - dirty all pages
> - fsync
> - dirty all pages again
> 
> in the non-real-time thread, then a short test that was a mediocre
> reproducer seems to work.
> 
> This is annoying, though -- I'm not generating twice as much write I/O
> as I used to.  Is there any way to force the delalloc code to do its
> thing without triggering writeback?  I don't think fallocate has this
> effect.
  fallocate() will preallocate blocks on disk backing the mapped page. That
should get rid of latency in __block_write_begin(). Extents will still be
marked as uninitialized, but conversion from uninitialized to initialized
state happens during writeback / IO completion so you should not care much
about it.

									Honza
-- 
Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
SUSE Labs, CR

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      reply	other threads:[~2011-11-02 20:17 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 19+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2011-10-20  0:39 Latency writing to an mlocked ext4 mapping Andy Lutomirski
2011-10-20  1:02 ` Andreas Dilger
2011-10-20  1:15   ` Andy Lutomirski
2011-10-20  2:17     ` Andy Lutomirski
2011-10-20  5:59       ` Andy Lutomirski
2011-10-25 12:26         ` Jan Kara
2011-10-28 23:37           ` Andy Lutomirski
2011-10-28 23:39             ` [PATCH] mm: Improve cmtime update on shared writable mmaps Andy Lutomirski
2011-11-01 22:53               ` Jan Kara
2011-11-01 23:02                 ` Andy Lutomirski
2011-11-02  7:38                   ` Christoph Hellwig
2011-11-02 15:02                   ` Jan Kara
2011-11-02 15:19                     ` Ted Ts'o
2011-10-31 23:10             ` Latency writing to an mlocked ext4 mapping Jan Kara
2011-10-31 23:14               ` Andy Lutomirski
2011-11-01 23:03                 ` Jan Kara
2011-11-01 23:10                   ` Andy Lutomirski
2011-11-02  1:51                     ` Andy Lutomirski
2011-11-02 20:17                       ` Jan Kara [this message]

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