LSF/MM 2014 Call For Proposals

LSF/MM 2014 Call For Proposals

[Mel Gorman]

The annual Linux Storage, Filesystem and Memory Management Summit for
2014 will be held on March 24th and 25th before the Linux Foundation
Collaboration summit at The Meritage Resort, Napa Valley, CA.

	http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linux-storage-filesystem-and-mm-summit
	http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/collaboration-summit

Note that we are running LSF/MM a little earlier in 2014 than in previous
years.

On behalf of the committee I would like to issue a call for agenda proposals
that are suitable for cross-track discussion as well as more technical
subjects for discussion in the breakout sessions.

1) Suggestions for agenda topics should be sent before January 31st
2014 to:

	lsf-pc@lists.linux-foundation.org

and cc the Linux list or lists that are most interested in it:

	ATA: linux-ide@vger.kernel.org
	FS: linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org
	MM: linux-mm@kvack.org
	SCSI: linux-scsi@vger.kernel.org

People who need more time for visa applications should send proposals before
January 15th. The committee will complete the first round of selections
on that date to accommodate applications.

Please remember to tag your subject with [LSF/MM TOPIC] to make it
easier to track. Agenda topics and attendees will be selected by the
program committee, but the final agenda will be formed by consensus of
the attendees on the day.

We will try to cap attendance at around 25-30 per track to facilitate
discussions although the final numbers will depend on the room sizes at
the venue.

2) Requests to attend the summit should be sent to:

	lsf-pc@lists.linux-foundation.org

Please summarize what expertise you will bring to the meeting, and what
you would like to discuss. Please also tag your email with [LSF/MM ATTEND]
so there is less chance of it getting lost in the large mail pile.

Presentations are allowed to guide discussion, but are strongly
discouraged. There will be no recording or audio bridge. However, we expect
that written minutes will be published as we did in previous years

2013:
	http://lwn.net/Articles/548089/

2012:
	http://lwn.net/Articles/490114/
	http://lwn.net/Articles/490501/

2011:
	http://lwn.net/Articles/436871/
	http://lwn.net/Articles/437066/

3) If you have feedback on last year's meeting that we can use to
improve this year's, please also send that to:

	lsf-pc@lists.linux-foundation.org

Thank you on behalf of the program committee:

Storage:
	James Bottomley
	Martin K. Petersen

Filesystems:
	Trond Myklebust
	Jeff Layton
	Dave Chinner
	Jan Kara
	Ted Ts'o

MM:
	Rik van Riel
	Michel Lespinasse

-- 
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs

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[LSF/MM TOPIC] [ATTEND] persistent memory progress, management of storage & file systems

[Ric Wheeler]

I would like to attend this year and continue to talk about the work on enabling 
the new class of persistent memory devices. Specifically, very interested in 
talking about both using a block driver under our existing stack and also 
progress at the file system layer (adding xip/mmap tweaks to existing file 
systems and looking at new file systems).

We also have a lot of work left to do on unifying management, it would be good 
to resync on that.

Regards,

Ric

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RE: [LSF/MM TOPIC] [ATTEND] persistent memory progress, management of storage & file systems

[faibish, sorin]

Speaking of persistent memory I would like to discuss the PMFS as well as RDMA aspects of the persistent memory model. Also I would like to discuss KV stores and object stores on persistent memory. I was involved in the PMFS as a tester and I found several issues that I would like to discuss with the community. I assume that maybe others from Intel could join this discussion except for Andy and Matt which already asked for this topic. Thanks

./Sorin

-----Original Message-----
From: linux-fsdevel-owner@vger.kernel.org [mailto:linux-fsdevel-owner@vger.kernel.org] On Behalf Of Ric Wheeler
Sent: Monday, January 06, 2014 5:21 PM
To: linux-scsi@vger.kernel.org; linux-ide@vger.kernel.org; linux-mm@kvack.org; linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org; lsf-pc@lists.linux-foundation.org
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: [LSF/MM TOPIC] [ATTEND] persistent memory progress, management of storage & file systems


I would like to attend this year and continue to talk about the work on enabling the new class of persistent memory devices. Specifically, very interested in talking about both using a block driver under our existing stack and also progress at the file system layer (adding xip/mmap tweaks to existing file systems and looking at new file systems).

We also have a lot of work left to do on unifying management, it would be good to resync on that.

Regards,

Ric

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Re: [LSF/MM TOPIC] [ATTEND] persistent memory progress, management of storage & file systems

[Joel Becker]

On Mon, Jan 06, 2014 at 05:32:56PM -0500, faibish, sorin wrote:
> Speaking of persistent memory I would like to discuss the PMFS as well as RDMA aspects of the persistent memory model. Also I would like to discuss KV stores and object stores on persistent memory. I was involved in the PMFS as a tester and I found several issues that I would like to discuss with the community. I assume that maybe others from Intel could join this discussion except for Andy and Matt which already asked for this topic. Thanks

Ooh, and the cluster/remote filesystem stories there (eg, RDMA etc) are
probably pretty cool.

Joel

> 
> ./Sorin
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: linux-fsdevel-owner@vger.kernel.org [mailto:linux-fsdevel-owner@vger.kernel.org] On Behalf Of Ric Wheeler
> Sent: Monday, January 06, 2014 5:21 PM
> To: linux-scsi@vger.kernel.org; linux-ide@vger.kernel.org; linux-mm@kvack.org; linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org; lsf-pc@lists.linux-foundation.org
> Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
> Subject: [LSF/MM TOPIC] [ATTEND] persistent memory progress, management of storage & file systems
> 
> 
> I would like to attend this year and continue to talk about the work on enabling the new class of persistent memory devices. Specifically, very interested in talking about both using a block driver under our existing stack and also progress at the file system layer (adding xip/mmap tweaks to existing file systems and looking at new file systems).
> 
> We also have a lot of work left to do on unifying management, it would be good to resync on that.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Ric
> 
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Re: LSF/MM 2014 Call For Proposals

[Michel Lespinasse]

On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 1:30 AM, Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> wrote:
> The annual Linux Storage, Filesystem and Memory Management Summit for
> 2014 will be held on March 24th and 25th before the Linux Foundation
> Collaboration summit at The Meritage Resort, Napa Valley, CA.
>
>         http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linux-storage-filesystem-and-mm-summit
>         http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/collaboration-summit

Just a reminder for anyone who wants to participate in LSF/MM: If you
haven't already done so, please send us your request and/or topic
proposals by January 31st...

> Note that we are running LSF/MM a little earlier in 2014 than in previous
> years.
>
> On behalf of the committee I would like to issue a call for agenda proposals
> that are suitable for cross-track discussion as well as more technical
> subjects for discussion in the breakout sessions.
>
> 1) Suggestions for agenda topics should be sent before January 31st
> 2014 to:
>
>         lsf-pc@lists.linux-foundation.org
>
> and cc the Linux list or lists that are most interested in it:
>
>         ATA: linux-ide@vger.kernel.org
>         FS: linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org
>         MM: linux-mm@kvack.org
>         SCSI: linux-scsi@vger.kernel.org
>
> People who need more time for visa applications should send proposals before
> January 15th. The committee will complete the first round of selections
> on that date to accommodate applications.
>
> Please remember to tag your subject with [LSF/MM TOPIC] to make it
> easier to track. Agenda topics and attendees will be selected by the
> program committee, but the final agenda will be formed by consensus of
> the attendees on the day.
>
> We will try to cap attendance at around 25-30 per track to facilitate
> discussions although the final numbers will depend on the room sizes at
> the venue.
>
> 2) Requests to attend the summit should be sent to:
>
>         lsf-pc@lists.linux-foundation.org
>
> Please summarize what expertise you will bring to the meeting, and what
> you would like to discuss. Please also tag your email with [LSF/MM ATTEND]
> so there is less chance of it getting lost in the large mail pile.
>
> Presentations are allowed to guide discussion, but are strongly
> discouraged. There will be no recording or audio bridge. However, we expect
> that written minutes will be published as we did in previous years
>
> 2013:
>         http://lwn.net/Articles/548089/
>
> 2012:
>         http://lwn.net/Articles/490114/
>         http://lwn.net/Articles/490501/
>
> 2011:
>         http://lwn.net/Articles/436871/
>         http://lwn.net/Articles/437066/
>
> 3) If you have feedback on last year's meeting that we can use to
> improve this year's, please also send that to:
>
>         lsf-pc@lists.linux-foundation.org
>
> Thank you on behalf of the program committee:
>
> Storage:
>         James Bottomley
>         Martin K. Petersen
>
> Filesystems:
>         Trond Myklebust
>         Jeff Layton
>         Dave Chinner
>         Jan Kara
>         Ted Ts'o
>
> MM:
>         Rik van Riel
>         Michel Lespinasse

-- 
Michel "Walken" Lespinasse
A program is never fully debugged until the last user dies.

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[LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Ric Wheeler]

One topic that has been lurking forever at the edges is the current 4k 
limitation for file system block sizes. Some devices in production today and 
others coming soon have larger sectors and it would be interesting to see if it 
is time to poke at this topic again.

LSF/MM seems to be pretty much the only event of the year that most of the key 
people will be present, so should be a great topic for a joint session.

Ric

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Re: [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Joel Becker]

On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 10:04:29PM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> One topic that has been lurking forever at the edges is the current
> 4k limitation for file system block sizes. Some devices in
> production today and others coming soon have larger sectors and it
> would be interesting to see if it is time to poke at this topic
> again.
> 
> LSF/MM seems to be pretty much the only event of the year that most
> of the key people will be present, so should be a great topic for a
> joint session.

Oh yes, I want in on this.  We handle 4k/16k/64k pages "seamlessly," and
we would want to do the same for larger sectors.  In theory, our code
should handle it with the appropriate defines updated.

Joel

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Re: [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Hannes Reinecke]

On 01/22/2014 06:20 AM, Joel Becker wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 10:04:29PM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
>> One topic that has been lurking forever at the edges is the current
>> 4k limitation for file system block sizes. Some devices in
>> production today and others coming soon have larger sectors and it
>> would be interesting to see if it is time to poke at this topic
>> again.
>>
>> LSF/MM seems to be pretty much the only event of the year that most
>> of the key people will be present, so should be a great topic for a
>> joint session.
> 
> Oh yes, I want in on this.  We handle 4k/16k/64k pages "seamlessly," and
> we would want to do the same for larger sectors.  In theory, our code
> should handle it with the appropriate defines updated.
> 
+1

The shingled drive folks would really love us for this.
Plus it would make live really easy for those type of devices.

Cheers,

Hannes
-- 
Dr. Hannes Reinecke		      zSeries & Storage
hare@suse.de			      +49 911 74053 688
SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nurnberg
GF: J. Hawn, J. Guild, F. Imendorffer, HRB 16746 (AG Nurnberg)

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Mel Gorman]

On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 10:04:29PM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> One topic that has been lurking forever at the edges is the current
> 4k limitation for file system block sizes. Some devices in
> production today and others coming soon have larger sectors and it
> would be interesting to see if it is time to poke at this topic
> again.
> 

Large block support was proposed years ago by Christoph Lameter
(http://lwn.net/Articles/232757/). I think I was just getting started
in the community at the time so I do not recall any of the details. I do
believe it motivated an alternative by Nick Piggin called fsblock though
(http://lwn.net/Articles/321390/). At the very least it would be nice to
know why neither were never merged for those of us that were not around
at the time and who may not have the chance to dive through mailing list
archives between now and March.

FWIW, I would expect that a show-stopper for any proposal is requiring
high-order allocations to succeed for the system to behave correctly.

-- 
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Ric Wheeler]

On 01/22/2014 04:34 AM, Mel Gorman wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 10:04:29PM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
>> One topic that has been lurking forever at the edges is the current
>> 4k limitation for file system block sizes. Some devices in
>> production today and others coming soon have larger sectors and it
>> would be interesting to see if it is time to poke at this topic
>> again.
>>
> Large block support was proposed years ago by Christoph Lameter
> (http://lwn.net/Articles/232757/). I think I was just getting started
> in the community at the time so I do not recall any of the details. I do
> believe it motivated an alternative by Nick Piggin called fsblock though
> (http://lwn.net/Articles/321390/). At the very least it would be nice to
> know why neither were never merged for those of us that were not around
> at the time and who may not have the chance to dive through mailing list
> archives between now and March.
>
> FWIW, I would expect that a show-stopper for any proposal is requiring
> high-order allocations to succeed for the system to behave correctly.
>

I have a somewhat hazy memory of Andrew warning us that touching this code takes 
us into dark and scary places.

ric

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Mel Gorman]

On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 09:10:48AM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> On 01/22/2014 04:34 AM, Mel Gorman wrote:
> >On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 10:04:29PM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> >>One topic that has been lurking forever at the edges is the current
> >>4k limitation for file system block sizes. Some devices in
> >>production today and others coming soon have larger sectors and it
> >>would be interesting to see if it is time to poke at this topic
> >>again.
> >>
> >Large block support was proposed years ago by Christoph Lameter
> >(http://lwn.net/Articles/232757/). I think I was just getting started
> >in the community at the time so I do not recall any of the details. I do
> >believe it motivated an alternative by Nick Piggin called fsblock though
> >(http://lwn.net/Articles/321390/). At the very least it would be nice to
> >know why neither were never merged for those of us that were not around
> >at the time and who may not have the chance to dive through mailing list
> >archives between now and March.
> >
> >FWIW, I would expect that a show-stopper for any proposal is requiring
> >high-order allocations to succeed for the system to behave correctly.
> >
> 
> I have a somewhat hazy memory of Andrew warning us that touching
> this code takes us into dark and scary places.
> 

That is a light summary. As Andrew tends to reject patches with poor
documentation in case we forget the details in 6 months, I'm going to guess
that he does not remember the details of a discussion from 7ish years ago.
This is where Andrew swoops in with a dazzling display of his eidetic
memory just to prove me wrong.

Ric, are there any storage vendor that is pushing for this right now?
Is someone working on this right now or planning to? If they are, have they
looked into the history of fsblock (Nick) and large block support (Christoph)
to see if they are candidates for forward porting or reimplementation?
I ask because without that person there is a risk that the discussion
will go as follows

Topic leader: Does anyone have an objection to supporting larger block
	sizes than the page size?
Room: Send patches and we'll talk.

-- 
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Ric Wheeler]

On 01/22/2014 09:34 AM, Mel Gorman wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 09:10:48AM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
>> On 01/22/2014 04:34 AM, Mel Gorman wrote:
>>> On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 10:04:29PM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
>>>> One topic that has been lurking forever at the edges is the current
>>>> 4k limitation for file system block sizes. Some devices in
>>>> production today and others coming soon have larger sectors and it
>>>> would be interesting to see if it is time to poke at this topic
>>>> again.
>>>>
>>> Large block support was proposed years ago by Christoph Lameter
>>> (http://lwn.net/Articles/232757/). I think I was just getting started
>>> in the community at the time so I do not recall any of the details. I do
>>> believe it motivated an alternative by Nick Piggin called fsblock though
>>> (http://lwn.net/Articles/321390/). At the very least it would be nice to
>>> know why neither were never merged for those of us that were not around
>>> at the time and who may not have the chance to dive through mailing list
>>> archives between now and March.
>>>
>>> FWIW, I would expect that a show-stopper for any proposal is requiring
>>> high-order allocations to succeed for the system to behave correctly.
>>>
>> I have a somewhat hazy memory of Andrew warning us that touching
>> this code takes us into dark and scary places.
>>
> That is a light summary. As Andrew tends to reject patches with poor
> documentation in case we forget the details in 6 months, I'm going to guess
> that he does not remember the details of a discussion from 7ish years ago.
> This is where Andrew swoops in with a dazzling display of his eidetic
> memory just to prove me wrong.
>
> Ric, are there any storage vendor that is pushing for this right now?
> Is someone working on this right now or planning to? If they are, have they
> looked into the history of fsblock (Nick) and large block support (Christoph)
> to see if they are candidates for forward porting or reimplementation?
> I ask because without that person there is a risk that the discussion
> will go as follows
>
> Topic leader: Does anyone have an objection to supporting larger block
> 	sizes than the page size?
> Room: Send patches and we'll talk.
>

I will have to see if I can get a storage vendor to make a public statement, but 
there are vendors hoping to see this land in Linux in the next few years. I 
assume that anyone with a shipping device will have to at least emulate the 4KB 
sector size for years to come, but that there might be a significant performance 
win for platforms that can do a larger block.

Note that windows seems to suffer from the exact same limitation, so we are not 
alone here with the vm page size/fs block size entanglement....

ric

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Mel Gorman]

On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 09:58:46AM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> On 01/22/2014 09:34 AM, Mel Gorman wrote:
> >On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 09:10:48AM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> >>On 01/22/2014 04:34 AM, Mel Gorman wrote:
> >>>On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 10:04:29PM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> >>>>One topic that has been lurking forever at the edges is the current
> >>>>4k limitation for file system block sizes. Some devices in
> >>>>production today and others coming soon have larger sectors and it
> >>>>would be interesting to see if it is time to poke at this topic
> >>>>again.
> >>>>
> >>>Large block support was proposed years ago by Christoph Lameter
> >>>(http://lwn.net/Articles/232757/). I think I was just getting started
> >>>in the community at the time so I do not recall any of the details. I do
> >>>believe it motivated an alternative by Nick Piggin called fsblock though
> >>>(http://lwn.net/Articles/321390/). At the very least it would be nice to
> >>>know why neither were never merged for those of us that were not around
> >>>at the time and who may not have the chance to dive through mailing list
> >>>archives between now and March.
> >>>
> >>>FWIW, I would expect that a show-stopper for any proposal is requiring
> >>>high-order allocations to succeed for the system to behave correctly.
> >>>
> >>I have a somewhat hazy memory of Andrew warning us that touching
> >>this code takes us into dark and scary places.
> >>
> >That is a light summary. As Andrew tends to reject patches with poor
> >documentation in case we forget the details in 6 months, I'm going to guess
> >that he does not remember the details of a discussion from 7ish years ago.
> >This is where Andrew swoops in with a dazzling display of his eidetic
> >memory just to prove me wrong.
> >
> >Ric, are there any storage vendor that is pushing for this right now?
> >Is someone working on this right now or planning to? If they are, have they
> >looked into the history of fsblock (Nick) and large block support (Christoph)
> >to see if they are candidates for forward porting or reimplementation?
> >I ask because without that person there is a risk that the discussion
> >will go as follows
> >
> >Topic leader: Does anyone have an objection to supporting larger block
> >	sizes than the page size?
> >Room: Send patches and we'll talk.
> >
> 
> I will have to see if I can get a storage vendor to make a public
> statement, but there are vendors hoping to see this land in Linux in
> the next few years.

What about the second and third questions -- is someone working on this
right now or planning to? Have they looked into the history of fsblock
(Nick) and large block support (Christoph) to see if they are candidates
for forward porting or reimplementation?

Don't get me wrong, I'm interested in the topic but I severely doubt I'd
have the capacity to research the background of this in advance. It's also
unlikely that I'd work on it in the future without throwing out my current
TODO list. In an ideal world someone will have done the legwork in advance
of LSF/MM to help drive the topic.

-- 
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Chris Mason]

On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 15:19 +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 09:58:46AM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> > On 01/22/2014 09:34 AM, Mel Gorman wrote:
> > >On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 09:10:48AM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> > >>On 01/22/2014 04:34 AM, Mel Gorman wrote:
> > >>>On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 10:04:29PM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> > >>>>One topic that has been lurking forever at the edges is the current
> > >>>>4k limitation for file system block sizes. Some devices in
> > >>>>production today and others coming soon have larger sectors and it
> > >>>>would be interesting to see if it is time to poke at this topic
> > >>>>again.
> > >>>>
> > >>>Large block support was proposed years ago by Christoph Lameter
> > >>>(http://lwn.net/Articles/232757/). I think I was just getting started
> > >>>in the community at the time so I do not recall any of the details. I do
> > >>>believe it motivated an alternative by Nick Piggin called fsblock though
> > >>>(http://lwn.net/Articles/321390/). At the very least it would be nice to
> > >>>know why neither were never merged for those of us that were not around
> > >>>at the time and who may not have the chance to dive through mailing list
> > >>>archives between now and March.
> > >>>
> > >>>FWIW, I would expect that a show-stopper for any proposal is requiring
> > >>>high-order allocations to succeed for the system to behave correctly.
> > >>>
> > >>I have a somewhat hazy memory of Andrew warning us that touching
> > >>this code takes us into dark and scary places.
> > >>
> > >That is a light summary. As Andrew tends to reject patches with poor
> > >documentation in case we forget the details in 6 months, I'm going to guess
> > >that he does not remember the details of a discussion from 7ish years ago.
> > >This is where Andrew swoops in with a dazzling display of his eidetic
> > >memory just to prove me wrong.
> > >
> > >Ric, are there any storage vendor that is pushing for this right now?
> > >Is someone working on this right now or planning to? If they are, have they
> > >looked into the history of fsblock (Nick) and large block support (Christoph)
> > >to see if they are candidates for forward porting or reimplementation?
> > >I ask because without that person there is a risk that the discussion
> > >will go as follows
> > >
> > >Topic leader: Does anyone have an objection to supporting larger block
> > >	sizes than the page size?
> > >Room: Send patches and we'll talk.
> > >
> > 
> > I will have to see if I can get a storage vendor to make a public
> > statement, but there are vendors hoping to see this land in Linux in
> > the next few years.
> 
> What about the second and third questions -- is someone working on this
> right now or planning to? Have they looked into the history of fsblock
> (Nick) and large block support (Christoph) to see if they are candidates
> for forward porting or reimplementation?

I really think that if we want to make progress on this one, we need
code and someone that owns it.  Nick's work was impressive, but it was
mostly there for getting rid of buffer heads.  If we have a device that
needs it and someone working to enable that device, we'll go forward
much faster.

-chris

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[James Bottomley]

On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 17:02 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:
> On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 15:19 +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 09:58:46AM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> > > On 01/22/2014 09:34 AM, Mel Gorman wrote:
> > > >On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 09:10:48AM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> > > >>On 01/22/2014 04:34 AM, Mel Gorman wrote:
> > > >>>On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 10:04:29PM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> > > >>>>One topic that has been lurking forever at the edges is the current
> > > >>>>4k limitation for file system block sizes. Some devices in
> > > >>>>production today and others coming soon have larger sectors and it
> > > >>>>would be interesting to see if it is time to poke at this topic
> > > >>>>again.
> > > >>>>
> > > >>>Large block support was proposed years ago by Christoph Lameter
> > > >>>(http://lwn.net/Articles/232757/). I think I was just getting started
> > > >>>in the community at the time so I do not recall any of the details. I do
> > > >>>believe it motivated an alternative by Nick Piggin called fsblock though
> > > >>>(http://lwn.net/Articles/321390/). At the very least it would be nice to
> > > >>>know why neither were never merged for those of us that were not around
> > > >>>at the time and who may not have the chance to dive through mailing list
> > > >>>archives between now and March.
> > > >>>
> > > >>>FWIW, I would expect that a show-stopper for any proposal is requiring
> > > >>>high-order allocations to succeed for the system to behave correctly.
> > > >>>
> > > >>I have a somewhat hazy memory of Andrew warning us that touching
> > > >>this code takes us into dark and scary places.
> > > >>
> > > >That is a light summary. As Andrew tends to reject patches with poor
> > > >documentation in case we forget the details in 6 months, I'm going to guess
> > > >that he does not remember the details of a discussion from 7ish years ago.
> > > >This is where Andrew swoops in with a dazzling display of his eidetic
> > > >memory just to prove me wrong.
> > > >
> > > >Ric, are there any storage vendor that is pushing for this right now?
> > > >Is someone working on this right now or planning to? If they are, have they
> > > >looked into the history of fsblock (Nick) and large block support (Christoph)
> > > >to see if they are candidates for forward porting or reimplementation?
> > > >I ask because without that person there is a risk that the discussion
> > > >will go as follows
> > > >
> > > >Topic leader: Does anyone have an objection to supporting larger block
> > > >	sizes than the page size?
> > > >Room: Send patches and we'll talk.
> > > >
> > > 
> > > I will have to see if I can get a storage vendor to make a public
> > > statement, but there are vendors hoping to see this land in Linux in
> > > the next few years.
> > 
> > What about the second and third questions -- is someone working on this
> > right now or planning to? Have they looked into the history of fsblock
> > (Nick) and large block support (Christoph) to see if they are candidates
> > for forward porting or reimplementation?
> 
> I really think that if we want to make progress on this one, we need
> code and someone that owns it.  Nick's work was impressive, but it was
> mostly there for getting rid of buffer heads.  If we have a device that
> needs it and someone working to enable that device, we'll go forward
> much faster.

Do we even need to do that (eliminate buffer heads)?  We cope with 4k
sector only devices just fine today because the bh mechanisms now
operate on top of the page cache and can do the RMW necessary to update
a bh in the page cache itself which allows us to do only 4k chunked
writes, so we could keep the bh system and just alter the granularity of
the page cache.

The other question is if the drive does RMW between 4k and whatever its
physical sector size, do we need to do anything to take advantage of
it ... as in what would altering the granularity of the page cache buy
us?

James


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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Chris Mason]

On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 09:21 -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 17:02 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:

[ I like big sectors and I cannot lie ]

>  
> > I really think that if we want to make progress on this one, we need
> > code and someone that owns it.  Nick's work was impressive, but it was
> > mostly there for getting rid of buffer heads.  If we have a device that
> > needs it and someone working to enable that device, we'll go forward
> > much faster.
> 
> Do we even need to do that (eliminate buffer heads)?  We cope with 4k
> sector only devices just fine today because the bh mechanisms now
> operate on top of the page cache and can do the RMW necessary to update
> a bh in the page cache itself which allows us to do only 4k chunked
> writes, so we could keep the bh system and just alter the granularity of
> the page cache.
> 

We're likely to have people mixing 4K drives and <fill in some other
size here> on the same box.  We could just go with the biggest size and
use the existing bh code for the sub-pagesized blocks, but I really
hesitate to change VM fundamentals for this.

>From a pure code point of view, it may be less work to change it once in
the VM.  But from an overall system impact point of view, it's a big
change in how the system behaves just for filesystem metadata.

> The other question is if the drive does RMW between 4k and whatever its
> physical sector size, do we need to do anything to take advantage of
> it ... as in what would altering the granularity of the page cache buy
> us?

The real benefit is when and how the reads get scheduled.  We're able to
do a much better job pipelining the reads, controlling our caches and
reducing write latency by having the reads done up in the OS instead of
the drive.

-chris

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[James Bottomley]

On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 18:02 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:
> On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 09:21 -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
> > On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 17:02 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:
> 
> [ I like big sectors and I cannot lie ]

I think I might be sceptical, but I don't think that's showing in my
concerns ...

> > > I really think that if we want to make progress on this one, we need
> > > code and someone that owns it.  Nick's work was impressive, but it was
> > > mostly there for getting rid of buffer heads.  If we have a device that
> > > needs it and someone working to enable that device, we'll go forward
> > > much faster.
> > 
> > Do we even need to do that (eliminate buffer heads)?  We cope with 4k
> > sector only devices just fine today because the bh mechanisms now
> > operate on top of the page cache and can do the RMW necessary to update
> > a bh in the page cache itself which allows us to do only 4k chunked
> > writes, so we could keep the bh system and just alter the granularity of
> > the page cache.
> > 
> 
> We're likely to have people mixing 4K drives and <fill in some other
> size here> on the same box.  We could just go with the biggest size and
> use the existing bh code for the sub-pagesized blocks, but I really
> hesitate to change VM fundamentals for this.

If the page cache had a variable granularity per device, that would cope
with this.  It's the variable granularity that's the VM problem.

> From a pure code point of view, it may be less work to change it once in
> the VM.  But from an overall system impact point of view, it's a big
> change in how the system behaves just for filesystem metadata.

Agreed, but only if we don't do RMW in the buffer cache ... which may be
a good reason to keep it.

> > The other question is if the drive does RMW between 4k and whatever its
> > physical sector size, do we need to do anything to take advantage of
> > it ... as in what would altering the granularity of the page cache buy
> > us?
> 
> The real benefit is when and how the reads get scheduled.  We're able to
> do a much better job pipelining the reads, controlling our caches and
> reducing write latency by having the reads done up in the OS instead of
> the drive.

I agree with all of that, but my question is still can we do this by
propagating alignment and chunk size information (i.e. the physical
sector size) like we do today.  If the FS knows the optimal I/O patterns
and tries to follow them, the odd cockup won't impact performance
dramatically.  The real question is can the FS make use of this layout
information *without* changing the page cache granularity?  Only if you
answer me "no" to this do I think we need to worry about changing page
cache granularity.

Realistically, if you look at what the I/O schedulers output on a
standard (spinning rust) workload, it's mostly large transfers.
Obviously these are misalgned at the ends, but we can fix some of that
in the scheduler.  Particularly if the FS helps us with layout.  My
instinct tells me that we can fix 99% of this with layout on the FS + io
schedulers ... the remaining 1% goes to the drive as needing to do RMW
in the device, but the net impact to our throughput shouldn't be that
great.

James


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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Ric Wheeler]

On 01/22/2014 01:13 PM, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 18:02 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:
>> On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 09:21 -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
>>> On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 17:02 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:
>> [ I like big sectors and I cannot lie ]
> I think I might be sceptical, but I don't think that's showing in my
> concerns ...
>
>>>> I really think that if we want to make progress on this one, we need
>>>> code and someone that owns it.  Nick's work was impressive, but it was
>>>> mostly there for getting rid of buffer heads.  If we have a device that
>>>> needs it and someone working to enable that device, we'll go forward
>>>> much faster.
>>> Do we even need to do that (eliminate buffer heads)?  We cope with 4k
>>> sector only devices just fine today because the bh mechanisms now
>>> operate on top of the page cache and can do the RMW necessary to update
>>> a bh in the page cache itself which allows us to do only 4k chunked
>>> writes, so we could keep the bh system and just alter the granularity of
>>> the page cache.
>>>
>> We're likely to have people mixing 4K drives and <fill in some other
>> size here> on the same box.  We could just go with the biggest size and
>> use the existing bh code for the sub-pagesized blocks, but I really
>> hesitate to change VM fundamentals for this.
> If the page cache had a variable granularity per device, that would cope
> with this.  It's the variable granularity that's the VM problem.
>
>>  From a pure code point of view, it may be less work to change it once in
>> the VM.  But from an overall system impact point of view, it's a big
>> change in how the system behaves just for filesystem metadata.
> Agreed, but only if we don't do RMW in the buffer cache ... which may be
> a good reason to keep it.
>
>>> The other question is if the drive does RMW between 4k and whatever its
>>> physical sector size, do we need to do anything to take advantage of
>>> it ... as in what would altering the granularity of the page cache buy
>>> us?
>> The real benefit is when and how the reads get scheduled.  We're able to
>> do a much better job pipelining the reads, controlling our caches and
>> reducing write latency by having the reads done up in the OS instead of
>> the drive.
> I agree with all of that, but my question is still can we do this by
> propagating alignment and chunk size information (i.e. the physical
> sector size) like we do today.  If the FS knows the optimal I/O patterns
> and tries to follow them, the odd cockup won't impact performance
> dramatically.  The real question is can the FS make use of this layout
> information *without* changing the page cache granularity?  Only if you
> answer me "no" to this do I think we need to worry about changing page
> cache granularity.
>
> Realistically, if you look at what the I/O schedulers output on a
> standard (spinning rust) workload, it's mostly large transfers.
> Obviously these are misalgned at the ends, but we can fix some of that
> in the scheduler.  Particularly if the FS helps us with layout.  My
> instinct tells me that we can fix 99% of this with layout on the FS + io
> schedulers ... the remaining 1% goes to the drive as needing to do RMW
> in the device, but the net impact to our throughput shouldn't be that
> great.
>
> James
>

I think that the key to having the file system work with larger sectors is to 
create them properly aligned and use the actual, native sector size as their FS 
block size. Which is pretty much back the original challenge.

Teaching each and every file system to be aligned at the storage 
granularity/minimum IO size when that is larger than the physical sector size is 
harder I think.

ric

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[James Bottomley]

On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 13:17 -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> On 01/22/2014 01:13 PM, James Bottomley wrote:
> > On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 18:02 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:
> >> On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 09:21 -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
> >>> On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 17:02 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:
> >> [ I like big sectors and I cannot lie ]
> > I think I might be sceptical, but I don't think that's showing in my
> > concerns ...
> >
> >>>> I really think that if we want to make progress on this one, we need
> >>>> code and someone that owns it.  Nick's work was impressive, but it was
> >>>> mostly there for getting rid of buffer heads.  If we have a device that
> >>>> needs it and someone working to enable that device, we'll go forward
> >>>> much faster.
> >>> Do we even need to do that (eliminate buffer heads)?  We cope with 4k
> >>> sector only devices just fine today because the bh mechanisms now
> >>> operate on top of the page cache and can do the RMW necessary to update
> >>> a bh in the page cache itself which allows us to do only 4k chunked
> >>> writes, so we could keep the bh system and just alter the granularity of
> >>> the page cache.
> >>>
> >> We're likely to have people mixing 4K drives and <fill in some other
> >> size here> on the same box.  We could just go with the biggest size and
> >> use the existing bh code for the sub-pagesized blocks, but I really
> >> hesitate to change VM fundamentals for this.
> > If the page cache had a variable granularity per device, that would cope
> > with this.  It's the variable granularity that's the VM problem.
> >
> >>  From a pure code point of view, it may be less work to change it once in
> >> the VM.  But from an overall system impact point of view, it's a big
> >> change in how the system behaves just for filesystem metadata.
> > Agreed, but only if we don't do RMW in the buffer cache ... which may be
> > a good reason to keep it.
> >
> >>> The other question is if the drive does RMW between 4k and whatever its
> >>> physical sector size, do we need to do anything to take advantage of
> >>> it ... as in what would altering the granularity of the page cache buy
> >>> us?
> >> The real benefit is when and how the reads get scheduled.  We're able to
> >> do a much better job pipelining the reads, controlling our caches and
> >> reducing write latency by having the reads done up in the OS instead of
> >> the drive.
> > I agree with all of that, but my question is still can we do this by
> > propagating alignment and chunk size information (i.e. the physical
> > sector size) like we do today.  If the FS knows the optimal I/O patterns
> > and tries to follow them, the odd cockup won't impact performance
> > dramatically.  The real question is can the FS make use of this layout
> > information *without* changing the page cache granularity?  Only if you
> > answer me "no" to this do I think we need to worry about changing page
> > cache granularity.
> >
> > Realistically, if you look at what the I/O schedulers output on a
> > standard (spinning rust) workload, it's mostly large transfers.
> > Obviously these are misalgned at the ends, but we can fix some of that
> > in the scheduler.  Particularly if the FS helps us with layout.  My
> > instinct tells me that we can fix 99% of this with layout on the FS + io
> > schedulers ... the remaining 1% goes to the drive as needing to do RMW
> > in the device, but the net impact to our throughput shouldn't be that
> > great.
> >
> > James
> >
> 
> I think that the key to having the file system work with larger
> sectors is to 
> create them properly aligned and use the actual, native sector size as
> their FS 
> block size. Which is pretty much back the original challenge.

Only if you think laying out stuff requires block size changes.  If a 4k
block filesystem's allocation algorithm tried to allocate on a 16k
boundary for instance, that gets us a lot of the performance without
needing a lot of alteration.

It's not even obvious that an ignorant 4k layout is going to be so
bad ... the RMW occurs only at the ends of the transfers, not in the
middle.  If we say 16k physical block and average 128k transfers,
probabalistically we misalign on 6 out of 31 sectors (or 19% of the
time).  We can make that better by increasing the transfer size (it
comes down to 10% for 256k transfers.

> Teaching each and every file system to be aligned at the storage 
> granularity/minimum IO size when that is larger than the physical
> sector size is 
> harder I think.

But you're making assumptions about needing larger block sizes.  I'm
asking what can we do with what we currently have?  Increasing the
transfer size is a way of mitigating the problem with no FS support
whatever.  Adding alignment to the FS layout algorithm is another.  When
you've done both of those, I think you're already at the 99% aligned
case, which is "do we need to bother any more" territory for me.

James


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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Ric Wheeler]

On 01/22/2014 01:35 PM, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 13:17 -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
>> On 01/22/2014 01:13 PM, James Bottomley wrote:
>>> On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 18:02 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:
>>>> On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 09:21 -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
>>>>> On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 17:02 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:
>>>> [ I like big sectors and I cannot lie ]
>>> I think I might be sceptical, but I don't think that's showing in my
>>> concerns ...
>>>
>>>>>> I really think that if we want to make progress on this one, we need
>>>>>> code and someone that owns it.  Nick's work was impressive, but it was
>>>>>> mostly there for getting rid of buffer heads.  If we have a device that
>>>>>> needs it and someone working to enable that device, we'll go forward
>>>>>> much faster.
>>>>> Do we even need to do that (eliminate buffer heads)?  We cope with 4k
>>>>> sector only devices just fine today because the bh mechanisms now
>>>>> operate on top of the page cache and can do the RMW necessary to update
>>>>> a bh in the page cache itself which allows us to do only 4k chunked
>>>>> writes, so we could keep the bh system and just alter the granularity of
>>>>> the page cache.
>>>>>
>>>> We're likely to have people mixing 4K drives and <fill in some other
>>>> size here> on the same box.  We could just go with the biggest size and
>>>> use the existing bh code for the sub-pagesized blocks, but I really
>>>> hesitate to change VM fundamentals for this.
>>> If the page cache had a variable granularity per device, that would cope
>>> with this.  It's the variable granularity that's the VM problem.
>>>
>>>>   From a pure code point of view, it may be less work to change it once in
>>>> the VM.  But from an overall system impact point of view, it's a big
>>>> change in how the system behaves just for filesystem metadata.
>>> Agreed, but only if we don't do RMW in the buffer cache ... which may be
>>> a good reason to keep it.
>>>
>>>>> The other question is if the drive does RMW between 4k and whatever its
>>>>> physical sector size, do we need to do anything to take advantage of
>>>>> it ... as in what would altering the granularity of the page cache buy
>>>>> us?
>>>> The real benefit is when and how the reads get scheduled.  We're able to
>>>> do a much better job pipelining the reads, controlling our caches and
>>>> reducing write latency by having the reads done up in the OS instead of
>>>> the drive.
>>> I agree with all of that, but my question is still can we do this by
>>> propagating alignment and chunk size information (i.e. the physical
>>> sector size) like we do today.  If the FS knows the optimal I/O patterns
>>> and tries to follow them, the odd cockup won't impact performance
>>> dramatically.  The real question is can the FS make use of this layout
>>> information *without* changing the page cache granularity?  Only if you
>>> answer me "no" to this do I think we need to worry about changing page
>>> cache granularity.
>>>
>>> Realistically, if you look at what the I/O schedulers output on a
>>> standard (spinning rust) workload, it's mostly large transfers.
>>> Obviously these are misalgned at the ends, but we can fix some of that
>>> in the scheduler.  Particularly if the FS helps us with layout.  My
>>> instinct tells me that we can fix 99% of this with layout on the FS + io
>>> schedulers ... the remaining 1% goes to the drive as needing to do RMW
>>> in the device, but the net impact to our throughput shouldn't be that
>>> great.
>>>
>>> James
>>>
>> I think that the key to having the file system work with larger
>> sectors is to
>> create them properly aligned and use the actual, native sector size as
>> their FS
>> block size. Which is pretty much back the original challenge.
> Only if you think laying out stuff requires block size changes.  If a 4k
> block filesystem's allocation algorithm tried to allocate on a 16k
> boundary for instance, that gets us a lot of the performance without
> needing a lot of alteration.

The key here is that we cannot assume that writes happen only during 
allocation/append mode.

Unless the block size enforces it, we will have non-aligned, small block IO done 
to allocated regions that won't get coalesced.
>
> It's not even obvious that an ignorant 4k layout is going to be so
> bad ... the RMW occurs only at the ends of the transfers, not in the
> middle.  If we say 16k physical block and average 128k transfers,
> probabalistically we misalign on 6 out of 31 sectors (or 19% of the
> time).  We can make that better by increasing the transfer size (it
> comes down to 10% for 256k transfers.

This really depends on the nature of the device. Some devices could produce very 
erratic performance or even (not today, but some day) reject the IO.

>
>> Teaching each and every file system to be aligned at the storage
>> granularity/minimum IO size when that is larger than the physical
>> sector size is
>> harder I think.
> But you're making assumptions about needing larger block sizes.  I'm
> asking what can we do with what we currently have?  Increasing the
> transfer size is a way of mitigating the problem with no FS support
> whatever.  Adding alignment to the FS layout algorithm is another.  When
> you've done both of those, I think you're already at the 99% aligned
> case, which is "do we need to bother any more" territory for me.
>

I would say no, we will eventually need larger file system block sizes.

Tuning and getting 95% (98%?) of the way there with alignment and IO scheduler 
does help a lot. That is what we do today and it is important when looking for 
high performance.

However, this is more of a short term work around for a lack of a fundamental 
ability to do the right sized file system block for a specific class of device. 
As such, not a crisis that must be solved today, but rather something that I 
think is definitely worth looking at so we can figure this out over the next 
year or so.

Ric

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[James Bottomley]

On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 13:39 -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> On 01/22/2014 01:35 PM, James Bottomley wrote:
> > On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 13:17 -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
[...]
> >> I think that the key to having the file system work with larger
> >> sectors is to
> >> create them properly aligned and use the actual, native sector size as
> >> their FS
> >> block size. Which is pretty much back the original challenge.
> > Only if you think laying out stuff requires block size changes.  If a 4k
> > block filesystem's allocation algorithm tried to allocate on a 16k
> > boundary for instance, that gets us a lot of the performance without
> > needing a lot of alteration.
> 
> The key here is that we cannot assume that writes happen only during 
> allocation/append mode.

But that doesn't matter at all, does it?  If the file is sector aligned,
then the write is aligned.  If the write is short on a large block fs,
well we'd just have to do the RMW in the OS anyway ... is that any
better than doing it in the device?

> Unless the block size enforces it, we will have non-aligned, small
> block IO done 
> to allocated regions that won't get coalesced.

We always get that if it's the use pattern ... the question merely
becomes who bears the burden of RMW.

> > It's not even obvious that an ignorant 4k layout is going to be so
> > bad ... the RMW occurs only at the ends of the transfers, not in the
> > middle.  If we say 16k physical block and average 128k transfers,
> > probabalistically we misalign on 6 out of 31 sectors (or 19% of the
> > time).  We can make that better by increasing the transfer size (it
> > comes down to 10% for 256k transfers.
> 
> This really depends on the nature of the device. Some devices could
> produce very 
> erratic performance

Yes, we get that today with misaligned writes to the 4k devices.

>  or even (not today, but some day) reject the IO.

I really doubt this.  All 4k drives today do RMW ... I don't see that
changing any time soon.

> >> Teaching each and every file system to be aligned at the storage
> >> granularity/minimum IO size when that is larger than the physical
> >> sector size is
> >> harder I think.
> > But you're making assumptions about needing larger block sizes.  I'm
> > asking what can we do with what we currently have?  Increasing the
> > transfer size is a way of mitigating the problem with no FS support
> > whatever.  Adding alignment to the FS layout algorithm is another.  When
> > you've done both of those, I think you're already at the 99% aligned
> > case, which is "do we need to bother any more" territory for me.
> >
> 
> I would say no, we will eventually need larger file system block sizes.
> 
> Tuning and getting 95% (98%?) of the way there with alignment and IO
> scheduler 
> does help a lot. That is what we do today and it is important when
> looking for 
> high performance.
> 
> However, this is more of a short term work around for a lack of a
> fundamental 
> ability to do the right sized file system block for a specific class
> of device. 
> As such, not a crisis that must be solved today, but rather something
> that I 
> think is definitely worth looking at so we can figure this out over
> the next 
> year or so.

But this, I think, is the fundamental point for debate.  If we can pull
alignment and other tricks to solve 99% of the problem is there a need
for radical VM surgery?  Is there anything coming down the pipe in the
future that may move the devices ahead of the tricks?

James



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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Andrew Morton]

On Wed, 22 Jan 2014 11:30:19 -0800 James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@hansenpartnership.com> wrote:

> But this, I think, is the fundamental point for debate.  If we can pull
> alignment and other tricks to solve 99% of the problem is there a need
> for radical VM surgery?  Is there anything coming down the pipe in the
> future that may move the devices ahead of the tricks?

I expect it would be relatively simple to get large blocksizes working
on powerpc with 64k PAGE_SIZE.  So before diving in and doing huge
amounts of work, perhaps someone can do a proof-of-concept on powerpc
(or ia64) with 64k blocksize.

That way we'll at least have an understanding of what the potential
gains will be.  If the answer is "1.5%" then poof - go off and do
something else.

(And the gains on powerpc would be an upper bound - unlike powerpc, x86
still has to fiddle around with 16x as many pages and perhaps order-4
allocations(?))

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Chris Mason]

On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 11:50 -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Wed, 22 Jan 2014 11:30:19 -0800 James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@hansenpartnership.com> wrote:
> 
> > But this, I think, is the fundamental point for debate.  If we can pull
> > alignment and other tricks to solve 99% of the problem is there a need
> > for radical VM surgery?  Is there anything coming down the pipe in the
> > future that may move the devices ahead of the tricks?
> 
> I expect it would be relatively simple to get large blocksizes working
> on powerpc with 64k PAGE_SIZE.  So before diving in and doing huge
> amounts of work, perhaps someone can do a proof-of-concept on powerpc
> (or ia64) with 64k blocksize.


Maybe 5 drives in raid5 on MD, with 4K coming from each drive.  Well
aligned 16K IO will work, everything else will about the same as a rmw
from a single drive.

-chris

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[David Lang]

On Wed, 22 Jan 2014, Chris Mason wrote:

> On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 11:50 -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
>> On Wed, 22 Jan 2014 11:30:19 -0800 James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@hansenpartnership.com> wrote:
>>
>>> But this, I think, is the fundamental point for debate.  If we can pull
>>> alignment and other tricks to solve 99% of the problem is there a need
>>> for radical VM surgery?  Is there anything coming down the pipe in the
>>> future that may move the devices ahead of the tricks?
>>
>> I expect it would be relatively simple to get large blocksizes working
>> on powerpc with 64k PAGE_SIZE.  So before diving in and doing huge
>> amounts of work, perhaps someone can do a proof-of-concept on powerpc
>> (or ia64) with 64k blocksize.
>
>
> Maybe 5 drives in raid5 on MD, with 4K coming from each drive.  Well
> aligned 16K IO will work, everything else will about the same as a rmw
> from a single drive.

I think this is the key point to think about here. How will these new hard drive 
large block sizes differ from RAID stripes and SSD eraseblocks?

In all of these cases there are very clear advantages to doing the writes in 
properly sized and aligned chunks that correspond with the underlying structure 
to avoid the RMW overhead.

It's extremely unlikely that drive manufacturers will produce drives that won't 
work with any existing OS, so they are going to support smaller writes in 
firmware. If they don't, they won't be able to sell their drives to anyone 
running existing software. Given the Enterprise software upgrade cycle compared 
to the expanding storage needs, whatever they ship will have to work on OS and 
firmware releases that happened several years ago.

I think what is needed is some way to be able to get a report on how man RMW 
cycles have to happen. Then people can work on ways to reduce this number and 
measure the results.

I don't know if md and dm are currently smart enough to realize that the entire 
stripe is being overwritten and avoid the RMW cycle. If they can't, I would 
expect that once we start measuring it, they will gain such support.

David Lang

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 06:46:11PM -0800, David Lang wrote:
> It's extremely unlikely that drive manufacturers will produce drives
> that won't work with any existing OS, so they are going to support
> smaller writes in firmware. If they don't, they won't be able to
> sell their drives to anyone running existing software. Given the
> Enterprise software upgrade cycle compared to the expanding storage
> needs, whatever they ship will have to work on OS and firmware
> releases that happened several years ago.

I've been talking to a number of HDD vendors, and while most of the
discussions has been about SMR, the topic of 64k sectors did come up
recently.  In the opinion of at least one drive vendor, the pressure
or 64k sectors will start increasing (roughly paraphrasing that
vendor's engineer, "it's a matter of physics"), and it might not be
surprising that in 2 or 3 years, we might start seing drives with 64k
sectors.  Like with 4k sector drives, it's likely that at least
initial said drives will have an emulation mode where sub-64k writes
will require a read-modify-write cycle.

What I told that vendor was that if this were the case, he should
seriously consider submitting a topic proposal to the LSF/MM, since if
he wants those drives to be well supported, we need to start thinking
about what changes might be necessary at the VM and FS layers now.  So
hopefully we'll see a topic proposal from that HDD vendor in the next
couple of days.

The bottom line is that I'm pretty well convinced that like SMR
drives, 64k sector drives will be coming, and it's not something we
can duck.  It might not come as quickly as the HDD vendor community
might like --- I remember attending an IDEMA conference in 2008 where
they confidently predicted that 4k sector drives would be the default
in 2 years, and it took a wee bit longer than that.  But nevertheless,
looking at the most likely roadmap and trajectory of hard drive
technology, these are two things that will very likely be coming down
the pike, and it would be best if we start thinking about how to
engage with these changes constructively sooner rather than putting it
off and then getting caught behind the eight-ball later.

Cheers,

						- Ted

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Dave Chinner]

On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 11:50:02AM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Wed, 22 Jan 2014 11:30:19 -0800 James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@hansenpartnership.com> wrote:
> 
> > But this, I think, is the fundamental point for debate.  If we can pull
> > alignment and other tricks to solve 99% of the problem is there a need
> > for radical VM surgery?  Is there anything coming down the pipe in the
> > future that may move the devices ahead of the tricks?
> 
> I expect it would be relatively simple to get large blocksizes working
> on powerpc with 64k PAGE_SIZE.  So before diving in and doing huge
> amounts of work, perhaps someone can do a proof-of-concept on powerpc
> (or ia64) with 64k blocksize.

Reality check: 64k block sizes on 64k page Linux machines has been
used in production on XFS for at least 10 years. It's exactly the
same case as 4k block size on 4k page size - one page, one buffer
head, one filesystem block.

Cheers,

Dave.
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david@fromorbit.com

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 07:35:58PM +1100, Dave Chinner wrote:
> > 
> > I expect it would be relatively simple to get large blocksizes working
> > on powerpc with 64k PAGE_SIZE.  So before diving in and doing huge
> > amounts of work, perhaps someone can do a proof-of-concept on powerpc
> > (or ia64) with 64k blocksize.
> 
> Reality check: 64k block sizes on 64k page Linux machines has been
> used in production on XFS for at least 10 years. It's exactly the
> same case as 4k block size on 4k page size - one page, one buffer
> head, one filesystem block.

This is true for ext4 as well.  Block size == page size support is
pretty easy; the hard part is when block size > page size, due to
assumptions in the VM layer that requires that FS system needs to do a
lot of extra work to fudge around.  So the real problem comes with
trying to support 64k block sizes on a 4k page architecture, and can
we do it in a way where every single file system doesn't have to do
their own specific hacks to work around assumptions made in the VM
layer.

Some of the problems include handling the case where you get someone
dirties a single block in a sparse page, and the FS needs to manually
fault in the other 56k pages around that single page.  Or the VM not
understanding that page eviction needs to be done in chunks of 64k so
we don't have part of the block evicted but not all of it, etc.

					- Ted

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Dave Chinner]

On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 07:55:50AM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 07:35:58PM +1100, Dave Chinner wrote:
> > > 
> > > I expect it would be relatively simple to get large blocksizes working
> > > on powerpc with 64k PAGE_SIZE.  So before diving in and doing huge
> > > amounts of work, perhaps someone can do a proof-of-concept on powerpc
> > > (or ia64) with 64k blocksize.
> > 
> > Reality check: 64k block sizes on 64k page Linux machines has been
> > used in production on XFS for at least 10 years. It's exactly the
> > same case as 4k block size on 4k page size - one page, one buffer
> > head, one filesystem block.
> 
> This is true for ext4 as well.  Block size == page size support is
> pretty easy; the hard part is when block size > page size, due to
> assumptions in the VM layer that requires that FS system needs to do a
> lot of extra work to fudge around.  So the real problem comes with
> trying to support 64k block sizes on a 4k page architecture, and can
> we do it in a way where every single file system doesn't have to do
> their own specific hacks to work around assumptions made in the VM
> layer.
> 
> Some of the problems include handling the case where you get someone
> dirties a single block in a sparse page, and the FS needs to manually
> fault in the other 56k pages around that single page.  Or the VM not
> understanding that page eviction needs to be done in chunks of 64k so
> we don't have part of the block evicted but not all of it, etc.

Right, this is part of the problem that fsblock tried to handle, and
some of the nastiness it had was that a page fault only resulted in
the individual page being read from the underlying block. This means
that it was entirely possible that the filesystem would need to do
RMW cycles in the writeback path itself to handle things like block
checksums, copy-on-write, unwritten extent conversion, etc. i.e. all
the stuff that the page cache currently handles by doing RMW cycles
at the page level.

The method of using compound pages in the page cache so that the
page cache could do 64k RMW cycles so that a filesystem never had to
deal with new issues like the above was one of the reasons that
approach is so appealing to us filesystem people. ;)

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
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david@fromorbit.com

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Joel Becker]

On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 07:55:50AM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 07:35:58PM +1100, Dave Chinner wrote:
> > > 
> > > I expect it would be relatively simple to get large blocksizes working
> > > on powerpc with 64k PAGE_SIZE.  So before diving in and doing huge
> > > amounts of work, perhaps someone can do a proof-of-concept on powerpc
> > > (or ia64) with 64k blocksize.
> > 
> > Reality check: 64k block sizes on 64k page Linux machines has been
> > used in production on XFS for at least 10 years. It's exactly the
> > same case as 4k block size on 4k page size - one page, one buffer
> > head, one filesystem block.
> 
> This is true for ext4 as well.  Block size == page size support is
> pretty easy; the hard part is when block size > page size, due to
> assumptions in the VM layer that requires that FS system needs to do a
> lot of extra work to fudge around.  So the real problem comes with
> trying to support 64k block sizes on a 4k page architecture, and can
> we do it in a way where every single file system doesn't have to do
> their own specific hacks to work around assumptions made in the VM
> layer.

Yup, ditto for ocfs2.

Joel

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Martin K. Petersen]

>>>>> "James" == James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com> writes:

>> or even (not today, but some day) reject the IO.

James> I really doubt this.  All 4k drives today do RMW ... I don't see
James> that changing any time soon.

All consumer grade 4K phys drives do RMW.

It's a different story for enterprise drives. The vendors appear to be
divided between 4Kn and 512e with RMW mitigation.

-- 
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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Chris Mason]

On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 10:13 -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 18:02 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:

>  
> > We're likely to have people mixing 4K drives and <fill in some other
> > size here> on the same box.  We could just go with the biggest size and
> > use the existing bh code for the sub-pagesized blocks, but I really
> > hesitate to change VM fundamentals for this.
> 
> If the page cache had a variable granularity per device, that would cope
> with this.  It's the variable granularity that's the VM problem.

Agreed.  But once we go variable granularity we're basically talking the
large order allocation problem.

> 
> > From a pure code point of view, it may be less work to change it once in
> > the VM.  But from an overall system impact point of view, it's a big
> > change in how the system behaves just for filesystem metadata.
> 
> Agreed, but only if we don't do RMW in the buffer cache ... which may be
> a good reason to keep it.
> 
> > > The other question is if the drive does RMW between 4k and whatever its
> > > physical sector size, do we need to do anything to take advantage of
> > > it ... as in what would altering the granularity of the page cache buy
> > > us?
> > 
> > The real benefit is when and how the reads get scheduled.  We're able to
> > do a much better job pipelining the reads, controlling our caches and
> > reducing write latency by having the reads done up in the OS instead of
> > the drive.
> 
> I agree with all of that, but my question is still can we do this by
> propagating alignment and chunk size information (i.e. the physical
> sector size) like we do today.  If the FS knows the optimal I/O patterns
> and tries to follow them, the odd cockup won't impact performance
> dramatically.  The real question is can the FS make use of this layout
> information *without* changing the page cache granularity?  Only if you
> answer me "no" to this do I think we need to worry about changing page
> cache granularity.

Can it mostly work?  I think the answer is yes.  If not we'd have a lot
of miserable people on top of raid5/6 right now.  We can always make a
generic r/m/w engine in DM that supports larger sectors transparently.

> 
> Realistically, if you look at what the I/O schedulers output on a
> standard (spinning rust) workload, it's mostly large transfers.
> Obviously these are misalgned at the ends, but we can fix some of that
> in the scheduler.  Particularly if the FS helps us with layout.  My
> instinct tells me that we can fix 99% of this with layout on the FS + io
> schedulers ... the remaining 1% goes to the drive as needing to do RMW
> in the device, but the net impact to our throughput shouldn't be that
> great.

There are a few workloads where the VM and the FS would team up to make
this fairly miserable

Small files.  Delayed allocation fixes a lot of this, but the VM doesn't
realize that fileA, fileB, fileC, and fileD all need to be written at
the same time to avoid RMW.  Btrfs and MD have setup plugging callbacks
to accumulate full stripes as much as possible, but it still hurts.

Metadata.  These writes are very latency sensitive and we'll gain a lot
if the FS is explicitly trying to build full sector IOs.

I do agree that its very likely these drives are going to silently rmw
in the background for us.

Circling back to what we might talk about at the conference, Ric do you
have any ideas on when these drives might hit the wild?

-chris

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Ric Wheeler]

On 01/22/2014 01:37 PM, Chris Mason wrote:
> Circling back to what we might talk about at the conference, Ric do you
> have any ideas on when these drives might hit the wild?
>
> -chris

I will poke at vendors to see if we can get someone to make a public statement,
but I cannot do that for them.

Ric

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[James Bottomley]

On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 18:37 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:
> On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 10:13 -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
> > On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 18:02 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:
[agreement cut because it's boring for the reader]
> > Realistically, if you look at what the I/O schedulers output on a
> > standard (spinning rust) workload, it's mostly large transfers.
> > Obviously these are misalgned at the ends, but we can fix some of that
> > in the scheduler.  Particularly if the FS helps us with layout.  My
> > instinct tells me that we can fix 99% of this with layout on the FS + io
> > schedulers ... the remaining 1% goes to the drive as needing to do RMW
> > in the device, but the net impact to our throughput shouldn't be that
> > great.
> 
> There are a few workloads where the VM and the FS would team up to make
> this fairly miserable
> 
> Small files.  Delayed allocation fixes a lot of this, but the VM doesn't
> realize that fileA, fileB, fileC, and fileD all need to be written at
> the same time to avoid RMW.  Btrfs and MD have setup plugging callbacks
> to accumulate full stripes as much as possible, but it still hurts.
> 
> Metadata.  These writes are very latency sensitive and we'll gain a lot
> if the FS is explicitly trying to build full sector IOs.

OK, so these two cases I buy ... the question is can we do something
about them today without increasing the block size?

The metadata problem, in particular, might be block independent: we
still have a lot of small chunks to write out at fractured locations.
With a large block size, the FS knows it's been bad and can expect the
rolled up newspaper, but it's not clear what it could do about it.

The small files issue looks like something we should be tackling today
since writing out adjacent files would actually help us get bigger
transfers.

James



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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Joel Becker]

On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 10:47:01AM -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 18:37 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:
> > On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 10:13 -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 18:02 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:
> [agreement cut because it's boring for the reader]
> > > Realistically, if you look at what the I/O schedulers output on a
> > > standard (spinning rust) workload, it's mostly large transfers.
> > > Obviously these are misalgned at the ends, but we can fix some of that
> > > in the scheduler.  Particularly if the FS helps us with layout.  My
> > > instinct tells me that we can fix 99% of this with layout on the FS + io
> > > schedulers ... the remaining 1% goes to the drive as needing to do RMW
> > > in the device, but the net impact to our throughput shouldn't be that
> > > great.
> > 
> > There are a few workloads where the VM and the FS would team up to make
> > this fairly miserable
> > 
> > Small files.  Delayed allocation fixes a lot of this, but the VM doesn't
> > realize that fileA, fileB, fileC, and fileD all need to be written at
> > the same time to avoid RMW.  Btrfs and MD have setup plugging callbacks
> > to accumulate full stripes as much as possible, but it still hurts.
> > 
> > Metadata.  These writes are very latency sensitive and we'll gain a lot
> > if the FS is explicitly trying to build full sector IOs.
> 
> OK, so these two cases I buy ... the question is can we do something
> about them today without increasing the block size?
> 
> The metadata problem, in particular, might be block independent: we
> still have a lot of small chunks to write out at fractured locations.
> With a large block size, the FS knows it's been bad and can expect the
> rolled up newspaper, but it's not clear what it could do about it.
> 
> The small files issue looks like something we should be tackling today
> since writing out adjacent files would actually help us get bigger
> transfers.

ocfs2 can actually take significant advantage here, because we store
small file data in-inode.  This would grow our in-inode size from ~3K to
~15K or ~63K.  We'd actually have to do more work to start putting more
than one inode in a block (thought that would be a promising avenue too
once the coordination is solved generically.

Joel


-- 

"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the
 belief that one's work is terribly important."
         - Bertrand Russell 

			http://www.jlbec.org/
			jlbec@evilplan.org

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Chris Mason]

On Thu, 2014-01-23 at 13:27 -0800, Joel Becker wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 10:47:01AM -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
> > On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 18:37 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 10:13 -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
> > > > On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 18:02 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:
> > [agreement cut because it's boring for the reader]
> > > > Realistically, if you look at what the I/O schedulers output on a
> > > > standard (spinning rust) workload, it's mostly large transfers.
> > > > Obviously these are misalgned at the ends, but we can fix some of that
> > > > in the scheduler.  Particularly if the FS helps us with layout.  My
> > > > instinct tells me that we can fix 99% of this with layout on the FS + io
> > > > schedulers ... the remaining 1% goes to the drive as needing to do RMW
> > > > in the device, but the net impact to our throughput shouldn't be that
> > > > great.
> > > 
> > > There are a few workloads where the VM and the FS would team up to make
> > > this fairly miserable
> > > 
> > > Small files.  Delayed allocation fixes a lot of this, but the VM doesn't
> > > realize that fileA, fileB, fileC, and fileD all need to be written at
> > > the same time to avoid RMW.  Btrfs and MD have setup plugging callbacks
> > > to accumulate full stripes as much as possible, but it still hurts.
> > > 
> > > Metadata.  These writes are very latency sensitive and we'll gain a lot
> > > if the FS is explicitly trying to build full sector IOs.
> > 
> > OK, so these two cases I buy ... the question is can we do something
> > about them today without increasing the block size?
> > 
> > The metadata problem, in particular, might be block independent: we
> > still have a lot of small chunks to write out at fractured locations.
> > With a large block size, the FS knows it's been bad and can expect the
> > rolled up newspaper, but it's not clear what it could do about it.
> > 
> > The small files issue looks like something we should be tackling today
> > since writing out adjacent files would actually help us get bigger
> > transfers.
> 
> ocfs2 can actually take significant advantage here, because we store
> small file data in-inode.  This would grow our in-inode size from ~3K to
> ~15K or ~63K.  We'd actually have to do more work to start putting more
> than one inode in a block (thought that would be a promising avenue too
> once the coordination is solved generically.

Btrfs already defaults to 16K metadata and can go as high as 64k.  The
part we don't do is multi-page sectors for data blocks.

I'd tend to leverage the read/modify/write engine from the raid code for
that.

-chris

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Dave Chinner]

On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 10:13:59AM -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 18:02 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:
> > On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 09:21 -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 17:02 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:
> > 
> > [ I like big sectors and I cannot lie ]
> 
> I think I might be sceptical, but I don't think that's showing in my
> concerns ...
> 
> > > > I really think that if we want to make progress on this one, we need
> > > > code and someone that owns it.  Nick's work was impressive, but it was
> > > > mostly there for getting rid of buffer heads.  If we have a device that
> > > > needs it and someone working to enable that device, we'll go forward
> > > > much faster.
> > > 
> > > Do we even need to do that (eliminate buffer heads)?  We cope with 4k
> > > sector only devices just fine today because the bh mechanisms now
> > > operate on top of the page cache and can do the RMW necessary to update
> > > a bh in the page cache itself which allows us to do only 4k chunked
> > > writes, so we could keep the bh system and just alter the granularity of
> > > the page cache.
> > > 
> > 
> > We're likely to have people mixing 4K drives and <fill in some other
> > size here> on the same box.  We could just go with the biggest size and
> > use the existing bh code for the sub-pagesized blocks, but I really
> > hesitate to change VM fundamentals for this.
> 
> If the page cache had a variable granularity per device, that would cope
> with this.  It's the variable granularity that's the VM problem.
> 
> > From a pure code point of view, it may be less work to change it once in
> > the VM.  But from an overall system impact point of view, it's a big
> > change in how the system behaves just for filesystem metadata.
> 
> Agreed, but only if we don't do RMW in the buffer cache ... which may be
> a good reason to keep it.
> 
> > > The other question is if the drive does RMW between 4k and whatever its
> > > physical sector size, do we need to do anything to take advantage of
> > > it ... as in what would altering the granularity of the page cache buy
> > > us?
> > 
> > The real benefit is when and how the reads get scheduled.  We're able to
> > do a much better job pipelining the reads, controlling our caches and
> > reducing write latency by having the reads done up in the OS instead of
> > the drive.
> 
> I agree with all of that, but my question is still can we do this by
> propagating alignment and chunk size information (i.e. the physical
> sector size) like we do today.  If the FS knows the optimal I/O patterns
> and tries to follow them, the odd cockup won't impact performance
> dramatically.  The real question is can the FS make use of this layout
> information *without* changing the page cache granularity?  Only if you
> answer me "no" to this do I think we need to worry about changing page
> cache granularity.

We already do this today.

The problem is that we are limited by the page cache assumption that
the block device/filesystem never need to manage multiple pages as
an atomic unit of change. Hence we can't use the generic
infrastructure as it stands to handle block/sector sizes larger than
a page size...

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[James Bottomley]

On Thu, 2014-01-23 at 19:27 +1100, Dave Chinner wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 10:13:59AM -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
> > On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 18:02 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 09:21 -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
> > > > On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 17:02 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:
> > > 
> > > [ I like big sectors and I cannot lie ]
> > 
> > I think I might be sceptical, but I don't think that's showing in my
> > concerns ...
> > 
> > > > > I really think that if we want to make progress on this one, we need
> > > > > code and someone that owns it.  Nick's work was impressive, but it was
> > > > > mostly there for getting rid of buffer heads.  If we have a device that
> > > > > needs it and someone working to enable that device, we'll go forward
> > > > > much faster.
> > > > 
> > > > Do we even need to do that (eliminate buffer heads)?  We cope with 4k
> > > > sector only devices just fine today because the bh mechanisms now
> > > > operate on top of the page cache and can do the RMW necessary to update
> > > > a bh in the page cache itself which allows us to do only 4k chunked
> > > > writes, so we could keep the bh system and just alter the granularity of
> > > > the page cache.
> > > > 
> > > 
> > > We're likely to have people mixing 4K drives and <fill in some other
> > > size here> on the same box.  We could just go with the biggest size and
> > > use the existing bh code for the sub-pagesized blocks, but I really
> > > hesitate to change VM fundamentals for this.
> > 
> > If the page cache had a variable granularity per device, that would cope
> > with this.  It's the variable granularity that's the VM problem.
> > 
> > > From a pure code point of view, it may be less work to change it once in
> > > the VM.  But from an overall system impact point of view, it's a big
> > > change in how the system behaves just for filesystem metadata.
> > 
> > Agreed, but only if we don't do RMW in the buffer cache ... which may be
> > a good reason to keep it.
> > 
> > > > The other question is if the drive does RMW between 4k and whatever its
> > > > physical sector size, do we need to do anything to take advantage of
> > > > it ... as in what would altering the granularity of the page cache buy
> > > > us?
> > > 
> > > The real benefit is when and how the reads get scheduled.  We're able to
> > > do a much better job pipelining the reads, controlling our caches and
> > > reducing write latency by having the reads done up in the OS instead of
> > > the drive.
> > 
> > I agree with all of that, but my question is still can we do this by
> > propagating alignment and chunk size information (i.e. the physical
> > sector size) like we do today.  If the FS knows the optimal I/O patterns
> > and tries to follow them, the odd cockup won't impact performance
> > dramatically.  The real question is can the FS make use of this layout
> > information *without* changing the page cache granularity?  Only if you
> > answer me "no" to this do I think we need to worry about changing page
> > cache granularity.
> 
> We already do this today.
> 
> The problem is that we are limited by the page cache assumption that
> the block device/filesystem never need to manage multiple pages as
> an atomic unit of change. Hence we can't use the generic
> infrastructure as it stands to handle block/sector sizes larger than
> a page size...

If the compound page infrastructure exists today and is usable for this,
what else do we need to do? ... because if it's a couple of trivial
changes and a few minor patches to filesystems to take advantage of it,
we might as well do it anyway.  I was only objecting on the grounds that
the last time we looked at it, it was major VM surgery.  Can someone
give a summary of how far we are away from being able to do this with
the VM system today and what extra work is needed (and how big is this
piece of work)?

James


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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Mel Gorman]

On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 07:47:53AM -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Thu, 2014-01-23 at 19:27 +1100, Dave Chinner wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 10:13:59AM -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 18:02 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:
> > > > On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 09:21 -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
> > > > > On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 17:02 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > [ I like big sectors and I cannot lie ]
> > > 
> > > I think I might be sceptical, but I don't think that's showing in my
> > > concerns ...
> > > 
> > > > > > I really think that if we want to make progress on this one, we need
> > > > > > code and someone that owns it.  Nick's work was impressive, but it was
> > > > > > mostly there for getting rid of buffer heads.  If we have a device that
> > > > > > needs it and someone working to enable that device, we'll go forward
> > > > > > much faster.
> > > > > 
> > > > > Do we even need to do that (eliminate buffer heads)?  We cope with 4k
> > > > > sector only devices just fine today because the bh mechanisms now
> > > > > operate on top of the page cache and can do the RMW necessary to update
> > > > > a bh in the page cache itself which allows us to do only 4k chunked
> > > > > writes, so we could keep the bh system and just alter the granularity of
> > > > > the page cache.
> > > > > 
> > > > 
> > > > We're likely to have people mixing 4K drives and <fill in some other
> > > > size here> on the same box.  We could just go with the biggest size and
> > > > use the existing bh code for the sub-pagesized blocks, but I really
> > > > hesitate to change VM fundamentals for this.
> > > 
> > > If the page cache had a variable granularity per device, that would cope
> > > with this.  It's the variable granularity that's the VM problem.
> > > 
> > > > From a pure code point of view, it may be less work to change it once in
> > > > the VM.  But from an overall system impact point of view, it's a big
> > > > change in how the system behaves just for filesystem metadata.
> > > 
> > > Agreed, but only if we don't do RMW in the buffer cache ... which may be
> > > a good reason to keep it.
> > > 
> > > > > The other question is if the drive does RMW between 4k and whatever its
> > > > > physical sector size, do we need to do anything to take advantage of
> > > > > it ... as in what would altering the granularity of the page cache buy
> > > > > us?
> > > > 
> > > > The real benefit is when and how the reads get scheduled.  We're able to
> > > > do a much better job pipelining the reads, controlling our caches and
> > > > reducing write latency by having the reads done up in the OS instead of
> > > > the drive.
> > > 
> > > I agree with all of that, but my question is still can we do this by
> > > propagating alignment and chunk size information (i.e. the physical
> > > sector size) like we do today.  If the FS knows the optimal I/O patterns
> > > and tries to follow them, the odd cockup won't impact performance
> > > dramatically.  The real question is can the FS make use of this layout
> > > information *without* changing the page cache granularity?  Only if you
> > > answer me "no" to this do I think we need to worry about changing page
> > > cache granularity.
> > 
> > We already do this today.
> > 
> > The problem is that we are limited by the page cache assumption that
> > the block device/filesystem never need to manage multiple pages as
> > an atomic unit of change. Hence we can't use the generic
> > infrastructure as it stands to handle block/sector sizes larger than
> > a page size...
> 
> If the compound page infrastructure exists today and is usable for this,
> what else do we need to do? ... because if it's a couple of trivial
> changes and a few minor patches to filesystems to take advantage of it,
> we might as well do it anyway. 

Do not do this as there is no guarantee that a compound allocation will
succeed. If the allocation fails then it is potentially unrecoverable
because we can no longer write to storage then you're hosed. If you are
now thinking mempool then the problem becomes that the system will be
in a state of degraded performance for an unknowable length of time and
may never recover fully. 64K MMU page size systems get away with this
because the blocksize is still <= PAGE_SIZE and no core VM changes are
necessary. Critically, pages like the page table pages are the same size as
the basic unit of allocation used by the kernel so external fragmentation
simply is not a severe problem.

> I was only objecting on the grounds that
> the last time we looked at it, it was major VM surgery.  Can someone
> give a summary of how far we are away from being able to do this with
> the VM system today and what extra work is needed (and how big is this
> piece of work)?
> 

Offhand no idea. For fsblock, probably a similar amount of work than
had to be done in 2007 and I'd expect it would still require filesystem
awareness problems that Dave Chinner pointer out earlier. For large block,
it'd hit into the same wall that allocations must always succeed. If we
want to break the connection between the basic unit of memory managed
by the kernel and the MMU page size then I don't know but it would be a
fairly large amount of surgery and need a lot of design work. Minimally,
anything dealing with an MMU-sized amount of memory would now need to
deal with sub-pages and there would need to be some restrictions on how
sub-pages were used to mitigate the risk of external fragmentation -- do not
mix page table page allocations with pages mapped into the address space,
do not allow sub pages to be used by different processes etc. At the very
least there would be a performance impact because PAGE_SIZE is no longer a
compile-time constant. However, it would potentially allow the block size
to be at least the same size as this new basic allocation unit.

-- 
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[James Bottomley]

On Thu, 2014-01-23 at 16:44 +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 07:47:53AM -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
> > On Thu, 2014-01-23 at 19:27 +1100, Dave Chinner wrote:
> > > On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 10:13:59AM -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
> > > > On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 18:02 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:
> > > > > On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 09:21 -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
> > > > > > On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 17:02 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:
> > > > > 
> > > > > [ I like big sectors and I cannot lie ]
> > > > 
> > > > I think I might be sceptical, but I don't think that's showing in my
> > > > concerns ...
> > > > 
> > > > > > > I really think that if we want to make progress on this one, we need
> > > > > > > code and someone that owns it.  Nick's work was impressive, but it was
> > > > > > > mostly there for getting rid of buffer heads.  If we have a device that
> > > > > > > needs it and someone working to enable that device, we'll go forward
> > > > > > > much faster.
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > Do we even need to do that (eliminate buffer heads)?  We cope with 4k
> > > > > > sector only devices just fine today because the bh mechanisms now
> > > > > > operate on top of the page cache and can do the RMW necessary to update
> > > > > > a bh in the page cache itself which allows us to do only 4k chunked
> > > > > > writes, so we could keep the bh system and just alter the granularity of
> > > > > > the page cache.
> > > > > > 
> > > > > 
> > > > > We're likely to have people mixing 4K drives and <fill in some other
> > > > > size here> on the same box.  We could just go with the biggest size and
> > > > > use the existing bh code for the sub-pagesized blocks, but I really
> > > > > hesitate to change VM fundamentals for this.
> > > > 
> > > > If the page cache had a variable granularity per device, that would cope
> > > > with this.  It's the variable granularity that's the VM problem.
> > > > 
> > > > > From a pure code point of view, it may be less work to change it once in
> > > > > the VM.  But from an overall system impact point of view, it's a big
> > > > > change in how the system behaves just for filesystem metadata.
> > > > 
> > > > Agreed, but only if we don't do RMW in the buffer cache ... which may be
> > > > a good reason to keep it.
> > > > 
> > > > > > The other question is if the drive does RMW between 4k and whatever its
> > > > > > physical sector size, do we need to do anything to take advantage of
> > > > > > it ... as in what would altering the granularity of the page cache buy
> > > > > > us?
> > > > > 
> > > > > The real benefit is when and how the reads get scheduled.  We're able to
> > > > > do a much better job pipelining the reads, controlling our caches and
> > > > > reducing write latency by having the reads done up in the OS instead of
> > > > > the drive.
> > > > 
> > > > I agree with all of that, but my question is still can we do this by
> > > > propagating alignment and chunk size information (i.e. the physical
> > > > sector size) like we do today.  If the FS knows the optimal I/O patterns
> > > > and tries to follow them, the odd cockup won't impact performance
> > > > dramatically.  The real question is can the FS make use of this layout
> > > > information *without* changing the page cache granularity?  Only if you
> > > > answer me "no" to this do I think we need to worry about changing page
> > > > cache granularity.
> > > 
> > > We already do this today.
> > > 
> > > The problem is that we are limited by the page cache assumption that
> > > the block device/filesystem never need to manage multiple pages as
> > > an atomic unit of change. Hence we can't use the generic
> > > infrastructure as it stands to handle block/sector sizes larger than
> > > a page size...
> > 
> > If the compound page infrastructure exists today and is usable for this,
> > what else do we need to do? ... because if it's a couple of trivial
> > changes and a few minor patches to filesystems to take advantage of it,
> > we might as well do it anyway. 
> 
> Do not do this as there is no guarantee that a compound allocation will
> succeed.

I presume this is because in the current implementation compound pages
have to be physically contiguous.  For increasing granularity in the
page cache, we don't necessarily need this ... however, getting write
out to work properly without physically contiguous pages would be a bit
more challenging (but not impossible) to solve.

>  If the allocation fails then it is potentially unrecoverable
> because we can no longer write to storage then you're hosed. If you are
> now thinking mempool then the problem becomes that the system will be
> in a state of degraded performance for an unknowable length of time and
> may never recover fully. 64K MMU page size systems get away with this
> because the blocksize is still <= PAGE_SIZE and no core VM changes are
> necessary. Critically, pages like the page table pages are the same size as
> the basic unit of allocation used by the kernel so external fragmentation
> simply is not a severe problem.

Right, I understand this ... but we still need to wonder about what it
would take.  Even the simple fail a compound page allocation gets
treated in the kernel the same way as failing a single page allocation
in the page cache.

> > I was only objecting on the grounds that
> > the last time we looked at it, it was major VM surgery.  Can someone
> > give a summary of how far we are away from being able to do this with
> > the VM system today and what extra work is needed (and how big is this
> > piece of work)?
> > 
> 
> Offhand no idea. For fsblock, probably a similar amount of work than
> had to be done in 2007 and I'd expect it would still require filesystem
> awareness problems that Dave Chinner pointer out earlier. For large block,
> it'd hit into the same wall that allocations must always succeed.

I don't understand this.  Why must they succeed?  4k page allocations
don't have to succeed today in the page cache, so why would compound
page allocations have to succeed?

>  If we
> want to break the connection between the basic unit of memory managed
> by the kernel and the MMU page size then I don't know but it would be a
> fairly large amount of surgery and need a lot of design work. Minimally,
> anything dealing with an MMU-sized amount of memory would now need to
> deal with sub-pages and there would need to be some restrictions on how
> sub-pages were used to mitigate the risk of external fragmentation -- do not
> mix page table page allocations with pages mapped into the address space,
> do not allow sub pages to be used by different processes etc. At the very
> least there would be a performance impact because PAGE_SIZE is no longer a
> compile-time constant. However, it would potentially allow the block size
> to be at least the same size as this new basic allocation unit.

Hm, OK, so less appealing then.

James



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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Mel Gorman]

On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 11:55:35AM -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
> > > > > > <SNIP>
> > > > > > The real benefit is when and how the reads get scheduled.  We're able to
> > > > > > do a much better job pipelining the reads, controlling our caches and
> > > > > > reducing write latency by having the reads done up in the OS instead of
> > > > > > the drive.
> > > > > 
> > > > > I agree with all of that, but my question is still can we do this by
> > > > > propagating alignment and chunk size information (i.e. the physical
> > > > > sector size) like we do today.  If the FS knows the optimal I/O patterns
> > > > > and tries to follow them, the odd cockup won't impact performance
> > > > > dramatically.  The real question is can the FS make use of this layout
> > > > > information *without* changing the page cache granularity?  Only if you
> > > > > answer me "no" to this do I think we need to worry about changing page
> > > > > cache granularity.
> > > > 
> > > > We already do this today.
> > > > 
> > > > The problem is that we are limited by the page cache assumption that
> > > > the block device/filesystem never need to manage multiple pages as
> > > > an atomic unit of change. Hence we can't use the generic
> > > > infrastructure as it stands to handle block/sector sizes larger than
> > > > a page size...
> > > 
> > > If the compound page infrastructure exists today and is usable for this,
> > > what else do we need to do? ... because if it's a couple of trivial
> > > changes and a few minor patches to filesystems to take advantage of it,
> > > we might as well do it anyway. 
> > 
> > Do not do this as there is no guarantee that a compound allocation will
> > succeed.
> 
> I presume this is because in the current implementation compound pages
> have to be physically contiguous.

Well.... yes. In VM terms, a compound page is a high-order physically
contiguous page that has additional metadata and a destructor. A potentially
discontiguous buffer would need a different structure and always be accessed
with base-page-sized iterators.

> For increasing granularity in the
> page cache, we don't necessarily need this ... however, getting write
> out to work properly without physically contiguous pages would be a bit
> more challenging (but not impossible) to solve.
> 

Every filesystem would have to be aware of this potentially discontiguous
buffer. I do not know what the mechanics of fsblock were but I bet it
had to handle some sort of multiple page read/write when block size was
bigger than PAGE_SIZE.

> >  If the allocation fails then it is potentially unrecoverable
> > because we can no longer write to storage then you're hosed. If you are
> > now thinking mempool then the problem becomes that the system will be
> > in a state of degraded performance for an unknowable length of time and
> > may never recover fully. 64K MMU page size systems get away with this
> > because the blocksize is still <= PAGE_SIZE and no core VM changes are
> > necessary. Critically, pages like the page table pages are the same size as
> > the basic unit of allocation used by the kernel so external fragmentation
> > simply is not a severe problem.
> 
> Right, I understand this ... but we still need to wonder about what it
> would take.

So far on the table is

1. major filesystem overhawl
2. major vm overhawl
3. use compound pages as they are today and hope it does not go
   completely to hell, reboot when it does

>  Even the simple fail a compound page allocation gets
> treated in the kernel the same way as failing a single page allocation
> in the page cache.
> 

The percentages of failures are the problem here. If an order-0 allocation
fails then any number of actions the kernel takes will result in a free
page that can be used to satisfy the allocation. At worst, OOM killing a
process is guaranteed to free up order-0 pages but the same is not true
for compaction. Anti-fragmentation and compaction make this very difficult
and they go a long way here but it is not a 100% guarantee a compound
allocation will succeed in the future or be a cheap allocation.

> > > I was only objecting on the grounds that
> > > the last time we looked at it, it was major VM surgery.  Can someone
> > > give a summary of how far we are away from being able to do this with
> > > the VM system today and what extra work is needed (and how big is this
> > > piece of work)?
> > > 
> > 
> > Offhand no idea. For fsblock, probably a similar amount of work than
> > had to be done in 2007 and I'd expect it would still require filesystem
> > awareness problems that Dave Chinner pointer out earlier. For large block,
> > it'd hit into the same wall that allocations must always succeed.
> 
> I don't understand this.  Why must they succeed?  4k page allocations
> don't have to succeed today in the page cache, so why would compound
> page allocations have to succeed?
> 

4K page allocations can temporarily fail but almost any reclaim action
with the exception of slab reclaim will result in 4K allocation requests
succeeding again. The same is not true of compound pages. An adverse workload
could potentially use page table pages (unreclaimable other than OOM kill)
to prevent compound allocations ever succeeding.

That's why I suggested that it may be necessary to change the basic unit of
allocation the kernel uses to be larger than the MMU page size and restrict
how the sub pages are used. The requirement is to preserve the property that
"with the exception of slab reclaim that any reclaim action will result
in K-sized allocation succeeding" where K is the largest blocksize used by
any underlying storage device. From an FS perspective then certain things
would look similar to what they do today. Block data would be on physically
contiguous pages, buffer_heads would still manage the case where block_size
<= PAGEALLOC_PAGE_SIZE (as opposed to MMU_PAGE_SIZE), particularly for
dirty tracking and so on. The VM perspective is different because now it
has to handle MMU_PAGE_SIZE in a very different way, page reclaim of a page
becomes multiple unmap events and so on. There would also be anomalies such
as mlock of a range smaller than PAGEALLOC_PAGE_SIZE becomes difficult if
not impossible to sensibly manage because mlock of a 4K page effectively
pins the rest and it's not obvious how we would deal with the VMAs in that
case. It would get more than just the storage gains though. Some of the
scalability problems that deal with massive amount of struct pages may
magically go away if the base unit of allocation and management changes.

> >  If we
> > want to break the connection between the basic unit of memory managed
> > by the kernel and the MMU page size then I don't know but it would be a
> > fairly large amount of surgery and need a lot of design work. Minimally,
> > anything dealing with an MMU-sized amount of memory would now need to
> > deal with sub-pages and there would need to be some restrictions on how
> > sub-pages were used to mitigate the risk of external fragmentation -- do not
> > mix page table page allocations with pages mapped into the address space,
> > do not allow sub pages to be used by different processes etc. At the very
> > least there would be a performance impact because PAGE_SIZE is no longer a
> > compile-time constant. However, it would potentially allow the block size
> > to be at least the same size as this new basic allocation unit.
> 
> Hm, OK, so less appealing then.
> 

Yes. On the plus side, you get the type of compound pages you want. On the
negative side this would be a massive overhawl of a large chunk of the VM
with lots of nasty details.

-- 
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Matthew Wilcox]

On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 10:57:48AM +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
> So far on the table is
> 
> 1. major filesystem overhawl
> 2. major vm overhawl
> 3. use compound pages as they are today and hope it does not go
>    completely to hell, reboot when it does

Is the below paragraph an exposition of option 2, or is it an option 4,
change the VM unit of allocation?  Other than the names you're using,
this is basically what I said to Kirill in an earlier thread; either
scrap the difference between PAGE_SIZE and PAGE_CACHE_SIZE, or start
making use of it.

The fact that EVERYBODY in this thread has been using PAGE_SIZE when they
should have been using PAGE_CACHE_SIZE makes me wonder if part of the
problem is that the split in naming went the wrong way.  ie use PTE_SIZE
for 'the amount of memory pointed to by a pte_t' and use PAGE_SIZE for
'the amount of memory described by a struct page'.

(we need to remove the current users of PTE_SIZE; sparc32 and powerpc32,
but that's just a detail)

And we need to fix all the places that are currently getting the
distinction wrong.  SMOP ... ;-)  What would help is correct typing of
variables, possibly with sparse support to help us out.  Big Job.

> That's why I suggested that it may be necessary to change the basic unit of
> allocation the kernel uses to be larger than the MMU page size and restrict
> how the sub pages are used. The requirement is to preserve the property that
> "with the exception of slab reclaim that any reclaim action will result
> in K-sized allocation succeeding" where K is the largest blocksize used by
> any underlying storage device. From an FS perspective then certain things
> would look similar to what they do today. Block data would be on physically
> contiguous pages, buffer_heads would still manage the case where block_size
> <= PAGEALLOC_PAGE_SIZE (as opposed to MMU_PAGE_SIZE), particularly for
> dirty tracking and so on. The VM perspective is different because now it
> has to handle MMU_PAGE_SIZE in a very different way, page reclaim of a page
> becomes multiple unmap events and so on. There would also be anomalies such
> as mlock of a range smaller than PAGEALLOC_PAGE_SIZE becomes difficult if
> not impossible to sensibly manage because mlock of a 4K page effectively
> pins the rest and it's not obvious how we would deal with the VMAs in that
> case. It would get more than just the storage gains though. Some of the
> scalability problems that deal with massive amount of struct pages may
> magically go away if the base unit of allocation and management changes.

-- 
Matthew Wilcox				Intel Open Source Technology Centre
"Bill, look, we understand that you're interested in selling us this
operating system, but compare it to ours.  We can't possibly take such
a retrograde step."

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Dave Chinner]

On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 09:52:46PM -0700, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 10:57:48AM +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
> > So far on the table is
> > 
> > 1. major filesystem overhawl
> > 2. major vm overhawl
> > 3. use compound pages as they are today and hope it does not go
> >    completely to hell, reboot when it does
> 
> Is the below paragraph an exposition of option 2, or is it an option 4,
> change the VM unit of allocation?  Other than the names you're using,
> this is basically what I said to Kirill in an earlier thread; either
> scrap the difference between PAGE_SIZE and PAGE_CACHE_SIZE, or start
> making use of it.

Christoph Lamater's compound page patch set scrapped PAGE_CACHE_SIZE
and made it a variable that was set on the struct address_space when
it was instantiated by the filesystem. In effect, it allowed
filesystems to specify the unit of page cache allocation on a
per-inode basis.

> The fact that EVERYBODY in this thread has been using PAGE_SIZE when they
> should have been using PAGE_CACHE_SIZE makes me wonder if part of the
> problem is that the split in naming went the wrong way.  ie use PTE_SIZE
> for 'the amount of memory pointed to by a pte_t' and use PAGE_SIZE for
> 'the amount of memory described by a struct page'.

PAGE_CACHE_SIZE was never distributed sufficiently to be used, and
if you #define it to something other than PAGE_SIZE stuff will
simply break.

> (we need to remove the current users of PTE_SIZE; sparc32 and powerpc32,
> but that's just a detail)
> 
> And we need to fix all the places that are currently getting the
> distinction wrong.  SMOP ... ;-)  What would help is correct typing of
> variables, possibly with sparse support to help us out.  Big Job.

Yes, that's what the Christoph's patchset did.

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Mel Gorman]

On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 09:52:46PM -0700, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 10:57:48AM +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
> > So far on the table is
> > 
> > 1. major filesystem overhawl
> > 2. major vm overhawl
> > 3. use compound pages as they are today and hope it does not go
> >    completely to hell, reboot when it does
> 
> Is the below paragraph an exposition of option 2, or is it an option 4,
> change the VM unit of allocation?

Changing the VM unit of allocation is a major VM overhawl

> Other than the names you're using,
> this is basically what I said to Kirill in an earlier thread; either
> scrap the difference between PAGE_SIZE and PAGE_CACHE_SIZE, or start
> making use of it.
> 

No. The PAGE_CACHE_SIZE would depend on the underlying address space and
vary. The large block patchset would have to have done this but I did not
go back and review the patches due to lack of time. With that it starts
hitting into fragmentation problems that have to be addressed somehow and
cannot just be waved away.

> The fact that EVERYBODY in this thread has been using PAGE_SIZE when they
> should have been using PAGE_CACHE_SIZE makes me wonder if part of the
> problem is that the split in naming went the wrong way.  ie use PTE_SIZE
> for 'the amount of memory pointed to by a pte_t' and use PAGE_SIZE for
> 'the amount of memory described by a struct page'.
> 
> (we need to remove the current users of PTE_SIZE; sparc32 and powerpc32,
> but that's just a detail)
> 
> And we need to fix all the places that are currently getting the
> distinction wrong.  SMOP ... ;-)  What would help is correct typing of
> variables, possibly with sparse support to help us out.  Big Job.
> 

That's taking the approach of the large block patchset (as I understand
it, not reviewed, not working on this etc) without dealing with potential
fragmentation problems. Of course they could be remapped virtually if
necessary but that will be very constrained on 32-bit, the final transfer
to hardware will require scatter/gather and there is a setup/teardown
cost with virtual mappings such as faulting (setup) and IPIs to flush TLBs
(teardown) that would add overhead.

-- 
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Dave Chinner]

On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 04:44:38PM +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 07:47:53AM -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
> > On Thu, 2014-01-23 at 19:27 +1100, Dave Chinner wrote:
> > > On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 10:13:59AM -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
> > > > On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 18:02 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:
> > > > > > The other question is if the drive does RMW between 4k and whatever its
> > > > > > physical sector size, do we need to do anything to take advantage of
> > > > > > it ... as in what would altering the granularity of the page cache buy
> > > > > > us?
> > > > > 
> > > > > The real benefit is when and how the reads get scheduled.  We're able to
> > > > > do a much better job pipelining the reads, controlling our caches and
> > > > > reducing write latency by having the reads done up in the OS instead of
> > > > > the drive.
> > > > 
> > > > I agree with all of that, but my question is still can we do this by
> > > > propagating alignment and chunk size information (i.e. the physical
> > > > sector size) like we do today.  If the FS knows the optimal I/O patterns
> > > > and tries to follow them, the odd cockup won't impact performance
> > > > dramatically.  The real question is can the FS make use of this layout
> > > > information *without* changing the page cache granularity?  Only if you
> > > > answer me "no" to this do I think we need to worry about changing page
> > > > cache granularity.
> > > 
> > > We already do this today.
> > > 
> > > The problem is that we are limited by the page cache assumption that
> > > the block device/filesystem never need to manage multiple pages as
> > > an atomic unit of change. Hence we can't use the generic
> > > infrastructure as it stands to handle block/sector sizes larger than
> > > a page size...
> > 
> > If the compound page infrastructure exists today and is usable for this,
> > what else do we need to do? ... because if it's a couple of trivial
> > changes and a few minor patches to filesystems to take advantage of it,
> > we might as well do it anyway. 
> 
> Do not do this as there is no guarantee that a compound allocation will
> succeed. If the allocation fails then it is potentially unrecoverable
> because we can no longer write to storage then you're hosed.  If you are
> now thinking mempool then the problem becomes that the system will be
> in a state of degraded performance for an unknowable length of time and
> may never recover fully.

We are talking about page cache allocation here, not something deep
down inside the IO path that requires mempools to guarantee IO
completion. IOWs, we have an *existing error path* to return ENOMEM
to userspace when page cache allocation fails.

> 64K MMU page size systems get away with this
> because the blocksize is still <= PAGE_SIZE and no core VM changes are
> necessary. Critically, pages like the page table pages are the same size as
> the basic unit of allocation used by the kernel so external fragmentation
> simply is not a severe problem.

Christoph's old patches didn't need 64k MMU page sizes to work.
IIRC, the compound page was mapped via into the page cache as
individual 4k pages. Any change of state on the child pages followed
the back pointer to the head of the compound page and changed the
state of that page. On page faults, the individual 4k pages were
mapped to userspace rather than the compound page, so there was no
userspace visible change, either.

The question I had at the time that was never answered was this: if
pages are faulted and mapped individually through their own ptes,
why did the compound pages need to be contiguous? copy-in/out
through read/write was still done a PAGE_SIZE granularity, mmap
mappings were still on PAGE_SIZE granularity, so why can't we build
a compound page for the page cache out of discontiguous pages?

FWIW, XFS has long used discontiguous pages for large block support
in metadata. Some of that is vmapped to make metadata processing
simple. The point of this is that we don't need *contiguous*
compound pages in the page cache if we can map them into userspace
as individual PAGE_SIZE pages. Only the page cache management needs
to handle the groups of pages that make up a filesystem block
as a compound page....

> > I was only objecting on the grounds that
> > the last time we looked at it, it was major VM surgery.  Can someone
> > give a summary of how far we are away from being able to do this with
> > the VM system today and what extra work is needed (and how big is this
> > piece of work)?
> > 
> 
> Offhand no idea. For fsblock, probably a similar amount of work than
> had to be done in 2007 and I'd expect it would still require filesystem
> awareness problems that Dave Chinner pointer out earlier. For large block,
> it'd hit into the same wall that allocations must always succeed. If we
> want to break the connection between the basic unit of memory managed
> by the kernel and the MMU page size then I don't know but it would be a
> fairly large amount of surgery and need a lot of design work.

Here's the patch that Christoph wrote backin 2007 to add PAGE_SIZE
based mmap support:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.file-systems/18004

I don't claim to understand all of it, but it seems to me that most
of the design and implementation problems were solved....

.....

> At the very
> least there would be a performance impact because PAGE_SIZE is no longer a
> compile-time constant.

Christoph's patchset did this, and no discernable performance
difference could be measured as a result of making PAGE_SIZE a
variable rather than a compile time constant. I doubt that this has
changed much since then...

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Christoph Lameter]

On Thu, 23 Jan 2014, James Bottomley wrote:

> If the compound page infrastructure exists today and is usable for this,
> what else do we need to do? ... because if it's a couple of trivial
> changes and a few minor patches to filesystems to take advantage of it,
> we might as well do it anyway.  I was only objecting on the grounds that
> the last time we looked at it, it was major VM surgery.  Can someone
> give a summary of how far we are away from being able to do this with
> the VM system today and what extra work is needed (and how big is this
> piece of work)?

The main problem for me was the page cache. The VM would not be such a
problem. Changing the page cache function required updates to many
filesystems.


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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Dave Chinner]

On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 09:21:40AM -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 17:02 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:
> > On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 15:19 +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
> > > On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 09:58:46AM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> > > > On 01/22/2014 09:34 AM, Mel Gorman wrote:
> > > > >On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 09:10:48AM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> > > > >>On 01/22/2014 04:34 AM, Mel Gorman wrote:
> > > > >>>On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 10:04:29PM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> > > > >>>>One topic that has been lurking forever at the edges is the current
> > > > >>>>4k limitation for file system block sizes. Some devices in
> > > > >>>>production today and others coming soon have larger sectors and it
> > > > >>>>would be interesting to see if it is time to poke at this topic
> > > > >>>>again.
> > > > >>>>
> > > > >>>Large block support was proposed years ago by Christoph Lameter
> > > > >>>(http://lwn.net/Articles/232757/). I think I was just getting started
> > > > >>>in the community at the time so I do not recall any of the details. I do
> > > > >>>believe it motivated an alternative by Nick Piggin called fsblock though
> > > > >>>(http://lwn.net/Articles/321390/). At the very least it would be nice to
> > > > >>>know why neither were never merged for those of us that were not around
> > > > >>>at the time and who may not have the chance to dive through mailing list
> > > > >>>archives between now and March.
> > > > >>>
> > > > >>>FWIW, I would expect that a show-stopper for any proposal is requiring
> > > > >>>high-order allocations to succeed for the system to behave correctly.
> > > > >>>
> > > > >>I have a somewhat hazy memory of Andrew warning us that touching
> > > > >>this code takes us into dark and scary places.
> > > > >>
> > > > >That is a light summary. As Andrew tends to reject patches with poor
> > > > >documentation in case we forget the details in 6 months, I'm going to guess
> > > > >that he does not remember the details of a discussion from 7ish years ago.
> > > > >This is where Andrew swoops in with a dazzling display of his eidetic
> > > > >memory just to prove me wrong.
> > > > >
> > > > >Ric, are there any storage vendor that is pushing for this right now?
> > > > >Is someone working on this right now or planning to? If they are, have they
> > > > >looked into the history of fsblock (Nick) and large block support (Christoph)
> > > > >to see if they are candidates for forward porting or reimplementation?
> > > > >I ask because without that person there is a risk that the discussion
> > > > >will go as follows
> > > > >
> > > > >Topic leader: Does anyone have an objection to supporting larger block
> > > > >	sizes than the page size?
> > > > >Room: Send patches and we'll talk.
> > > > >
> > > > 
> > > > I will have to see if I can get a storage vendor to make a public
> > > > statement, but there are vendors hoping to see this land in Linux in
> > > > the next few years.
> > > 
> > > What about the second and third questions -- is someone working on this
> > > right now or planning to? Have they looked into the history of fsblock
> > > (Nick) and large block support (Christoph) to see if they are candidates
> > > for forward porting or reimplementation?
> > 
> > I really think that if we want to make progress on this one, we need
> > code and someone that owns it.  Nick's work was impressive, but it was
> > mostly there for getting rid of buffer heads.  If we have a device that
> > needs it and someone working to enable that device, we'll go forward
> > much faster.
> 
> Do we even need to do that (eliminate buffer heads)?

No, the reason bufferheads were replaced was that a bufferhead can
only reference a single page. i.e. the structure is that a page can
reference multipl bufferheads (block size >= page size) but a
bufferhead can't refernce multiple pages which is what is needed for
block size > page size. fsblock was designed to handle both cases.

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Christoph Lameter]

On Wed, 22 Jan 2014, Mel Gorman wrote:

> Don't get me wrong, I'm interested in the topic but I severely doubt I'd
> have the capacity to research the background of this in advance. It's also
> unlikely that I'd work on it in the future without throwing out my current
> TODO list. In an ideal world someone will have done the legwork in advance
> of LSF/MM to help drive the topic.

I can give an overview of the history and the challenges of the approaches
if needed.

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Martin K. Petersen]

>>>>> "Ric" == Ric Wheeler <rwheeler@redhat.com> writes:

Ric> I will have to see if I can get a storage vendor to make a public
Ric> statement, but there are vendors hoping to see this land in Linux
Ric> in the next few years. I assume that anyone with a shipping device
Ric> will have to at least emulate the 4KB sector size for years to
Ric> come, but that there might be a significant performance win for
Ric> platforms that can do a larger block.

I am aware of two companies that already created devices with 8KB
logical blocks and expected Linux to work. I had to do some explaining.

I agree with Ric that this is something we'll need to address sooner
rather than later.

-- 
Martin K. Petersen	Oracle Linux Engineering

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Dave Chinner]

On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 02:34:52PM +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 09:10:48AM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> > On 01/22/2014 04:34 AM, Mel Gorman wrote:
> > >On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 10:04:29PM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> > >>One topic that has been lurking forever at the edges is the current
> > >>4k limitation for file system block sizes. Some devices in
> > >>production today and others coming soon have larger sectors and it
> > >>would be interesting to see if it is time to poke at this topic
> > >>again.
> > >>
> > >Large block support was proposed years ago by Christoph Lameter
> > >(http://lwn.net/Articles/232757/). I think I was just getting started
> > >in the community at the time so I do not recall any of the details. I do
> > >believe it motivated an alternative by Nick Piggin called fsblock though
> > >(http://lwn.net/Articles/321390/). At the very least it would be nice to
> > >know why neither were never merged for those of us that were not around
> > >at the time and who may not have the chance to dive through mailing list
> > >archives between now and March.
> > >
> > >FWIW, I would expect that a show-stopper for any proposal is requiring
> > >high-order allocations to succeed for the system to behave correctly.
> > >
> > 
> > I have a somewhat hazy memory of Andrew warning us that touching
> > this code takes us into dark and scary places.
> > 
> 
> That is a light summary. As Andrew tends to reject patches with poor
> documentation in case we forget the details in 6 months, I'm going to guess
> that he does not remember the details of a discussion from 7ish years ago.
> This is where Andrew swoops in with a dazzling display of his eidetic
> memory just to prove me wrong.
> 
> Ric, are there any storage vendor that is pushing for this right now?
> Is someone working on this right now or planning to? If they are, have they
> looked into the history of fsblock (Nick) and large block support (Christoph)
> to see if they are candidates for forward porting or reimplementation?
> I ask because without that person there is a risk that the discussion
> will go as follows
> 
> Topic leader: Does anyone have an objection to supporting larger block
> 	sizes than the page size?
> Room: Send patches and we'll talk.

So, from someone who was done in the trenches of the large
filesystem block size code wars, the main objection to Christoph
lameter's patchset was that it used high order compound pages in the
page cache so that nothing at filesystem level needed to be changed
to support large block sizes.

The patch to enable XFS to use 64k block sizes with Christoph's
patches was simply removing 5 lines of code that limited the block
size to PAGE_SIZE. And everything just worked.

Given that compound pages are used all over the place now and we
also have page migration, compaction and other MM support that
greatly improves high order memory allocation, perhaps we should
revisit this approach.

As to Nick's fsblock rewrite, he basically rewrote all the
bufferhead head code to handle filesystem blocks larger than a page
whilst leaving the page cache untouched. i.e. the complete opposite
approach. The problem with this approach is that every filesystem
needs to be re-written to use fsblocks rather than bufferheads. For
some filesystems that isn't hard (e.g. ext2) but for filesystems
that use bufferheads in the core of their journalling subsystems
that's a completely different story.

And for filesystems like XFS, it doesn't solve any of the problem
with using bufferheads that we have now, so it simply introduces a
huge amount of IO path rework and validation without providing any
advantage from a feature or performance point of view. i.e. extent
based filesystems mostly negate the impact of filesystem block size
on IO performance...

Realistically, if I'm going to do something in XFS to add block size
> page size support, I'm going to do it wiht somethign XFS can track
through it's own journal so I can add data=journal functionality
with the same filesystem block/extent header structures used to
track the pages in blocks larger than PAGE_SIZE. And given that we
already have such infrastructure in XFS to support directory
blocks larger than filesystem block size....

FWIW, as to the original "large sector size" support question, XFS
already supports sector sizes up to 32k in size. The limitation is
actually a limitation of the journal format, so going larger than
that would take some work...

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Chris Mason]

On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 09:34 +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 10:04:29PM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> > One topic that has been lurking forever at the edges is the current
> > 4k limitation for file system block sizes. Some devices in
> > production today and others coming soon have larger sectors and it
> > would be interesting to see if it is time to poke at this topic
> > again.
> > 
> 
> Large block support was proposed years ago by Christoph Lameter
> (http://lwn.net/Articles/232757/). I think I was just getting started
> in the community at the time so I do not recall any of the details. I do
> believe it motivated an alternative by Nick Piggin called fsblock though
> (http://lwn.net/Articles/321390/). At the very least it would be nice to
> know why neither were never merged for those of us that were not around
> at the time and who may not have the chance to dive through mailing list
> archives between now and March.
> 
> FWIW, I would expect that a show-stopper for any proposal is requiring
> high-order allocations to succeed for the system to behave correctly.
> 

My memory is that Nick's work just didn't have the momentum to get
pushed in.  It all seemed very reasonable though, I think our hatred of
buffered heads just wasn't yet bigger than the fear of moving away.

But, the bigger question is how big are the blocks going to be?  At some
point (64K?) we might as well just make a log structured dm target and
have a single setup for both shingled and large sector drives.

-chris



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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[James Bottomley]

On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 15:14 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:
> On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 09:34 +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 10:04:29PM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> > > One topic that has been lurking forever at the edges is the current
> > > 4k limitation for file system block sizes. Some devices in
> > > production today and others coming soon have larger sectors and it
> > > would be interesting to see if it is time to poke at this topic
> > > again.
> > > 
> > 
> > Large block support was proposed years ago by Christoph Lameter
> > (http://lwn.net/Articles/232757/). I think I was just getting started
> > in the community at the time so I do not recall any of the details. I do
> > believe it motivated an alternative by Nick Piggin called fsblock though
> > (http://lwn.net/Articles/321390/). At the very least it would be nice to
> > know why neither were never merged for those of us that were not around
> > at the time and who may not have the chance to dive through mailing list
> > archives between now and March.
> > 
> > FWIW, I would expect that a show-stopper for any proposal is requiring
> > high-order allocations to succeed for the system to behave correctly.
> > 
> 
> My memory is that Nick's work just didn't have the momentum to get
> pushed in.  It all seemed very reasonable though, I think our hatred of
> buffered heads just wasn't yet bigger than the fear of moving away.
> 
> But, the bigger question is how big are the blocks going to be?  At some
> point (64K?) we might as well just make a log structured dm target and
> have a single setup for both shingled and large sector drives.

There is no real point.  Even with 4k drives today using 4k sectors in
the filesystem, we still get 512 byte writes because of journalling and
the buffer cache.

The question is what would we need to do to support these devices and
the answer is "try to send IO in x byte multiples x byte aligned" this
really becomes an ioscheduler problem, not a supporting large page
problem.

James


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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Ric Wheeler]

On 01/22/2014 11:03 AM, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 15:14 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:
>> On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 09:34 +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
>>> On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 10:04:29PM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
>>>> One topic that has been lurking forever at the edges is the current
>>>> 4k limitation for file system block sizes. Some devices in
>>>> production today and others coming soon have larger sectors and it
>>>> would be interesting to see if it is time to poke at this topic
>>>> again.
>>>>
>>> Large block support was proposed years ago by Christoph Lameter
>>> (http://lwn.net/Articles/232757/). I think I was just getting started
>>> in the community at the time so I do not recall any of the details. I do
>>> believe it motivated an alternative by Nick Piggin called fsblock though
>>> (http://lwn.net/Articles/321390/). At the very least it would be nice to
>>> know why neither were never merged for those of us that were not around
>>> at the time and who may not have the chance to dive through mailing list
>>> archives between now and March.
>>>
>>> FWIW, I would expect that a show-stopper for any proposal is requiring
>>> high-order allocations to succeed for the system to behave correctly.
>>>
>> My memory is that Nick's work just didn't have the momentum to get
>> pushed in.  It all seemed very reasonable though, I think our hatred of
>> buffered heads just wasn't yet bigger than the fear of moving away.
>>
>> But, the bigger question is how big are the blocks going to be?  At some
>> point (64K?) we might as well just make a log structured dm target and
>> have a single setup for both shingled and large sector drives.
> There is no real point.  Even with 4k drives today using 4k sectors in
> the filesystem, we still get 512 byte writes because of journalling and
> the buffer cache.

I think that you are wrong here James. Even with 512 byte drives, the IO's we 
send down tend to be 4k or larger. Do you have traces that show this and details?

>
> The question is what would we need to do to support these devices and
> the answer is "try to send IO in x byte multiples x byte aligned" this
> really becomes an ioscheduler problem, not a supporting large page
> problem.
>
> James
>

Not that simple.

The requirement of some of these devices are that you *never* send down a 
partial write or an unaligned write.

Also keep in mind that larger block sizes allow us to track larger files with 
smaller amounts of metadata which is a second win.

Ric

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[James Bottomley]

On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 11:45 -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> On 01/22/2014 11:03 AM, James Bottomley wrote:
> > On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 15:14 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:
> >> On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 09:34 +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
> >>> On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 10:04:29PM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> >>>> One topic that has been lurking forever at the edges is the current
> >>>> 4k limitation for file system block sizes. Some devices in
> >>>> production today and others coming soon have larger sectors and it
> >>>> would be interesting to see if it is time to poke at this topic
> >>>> again.
> >>>>
> >>> Large block support was proposed years ago by Christoph Lameter
> >>> (http://lwn.net/Articles/232757/). I think I was just getting started
> >>> in the community at the time so I do not recall any of the details. I do
> >>> believe it motivated an alternative by Nick Piggin called fsblock though
> >>> (http://lwn.net/Articles/321390/). At the very least it would be nice to
> >>> know why neither were never merged for those of us that were not around
> >>> at the time and who may not have the chance to dive through mailing list
> >>> archives between now and March.
> >>>
> >>> FWIW, I would expect that a show-stopper for any proposal is requiring
> >>> high-order allocations to succeed for the system to behave correctly.
> >>>
> >> My memory is that Nick's work just didn't have the momentum to get
> >> pushed in.  It all seemed very reasonable though, I think our hatred of
> >> buffered heads just wasn't yet bigger than the fear of moving away.
> >>
> >> But, the bigger question is how big are the blocks going to be?  At some
> >> point (64K?) we might as well just make a log structured dm target and
> >> have a single setup for both shingled and large sector drives.
> > There is no real point.  Even with 4k drives today using 4k sectors in
> > the filesystem, we still get 512 byte writes because of journalling and
> > the buffer cache.
> 
> I think that you are wrong here James. Even with 512 byte drives, the IO's we 
> send down tend to be 4k or larger. Do you have traces that show this and details?

It's mostly an ext3 journalling issue ... and it's only metadata and
mostly the ioschedulers can elevate it into 4k chunks, so yes, most of
our writes are 4k+, so this is a red herring, yes.

> >
> > The question is what would we need to do to support these devices and
> > the answer is "try to send IO in x byte multiples x byte aligned" this
> > really becomes an ioscheduler problem, not a supporting large page
> > problem.
> >
> > James
> >
> 
> Not that simple.
> 
> The requirement of some of these devices are that you *never* send down a 
> partial write or an unaligned write.

But this is the million dollar question.  That was originally going to
be the requirement of the 4k sector devices but look what happened in
the market.

> Also keep in mind that larger block sizes allow us to track larger
> files with 
> smaller amounts of metadata which is a second win.

Larger file block sizes are completely independent from larger device
block sizes (we can have 16k file block sizes on 4k or even 512b
devices).  The questions on larger block size devices are twofold:

     1. If manufacturers tell us that they'll only support I/O on the
        physical sector size, do we believe them, given that they said
        this before on 4k and then backed down.  All the logical vs
        physical sector stuff is now in T10 standards, why would they
        try to go all physical again, especially as they've now all
        written firmware that does the necessary RMW?
     2. If we agree they'll do RMW in Firmware again, what do we have to
        do to take advantage of larger sector sizes beyond what we
        currently do in alignment and chunking?  There may still be
        issues in FS journal and data layouts.

James


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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Jan Kara]

On Wed 22-01-14 09:00:33, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 11:45 -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> > On 01/22/2014 11:03 AM, James Bottomley wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 15:14 +0000, Chris Mason wrote:
> > >> On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 09:34 +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
> > >>> On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 10:04:29PM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> > >>>> One topic that has been lurking forever at the edges is the current
> > >>>> 4k limitation for file system block sizes. Some devices in
> > >>>> production today and others coming soon have larger sectors and it
> > >>>> would be interesting to see if it is time to poke at this topic
> > >>>> again.
> > >>>>
> > >>> Large block support was proposed years ago by Christoph Lameter
> > >>> (http://lwn.net/Articles/232757/). I think I was just getting started
> > >>> in the community at the time so I do not recall any of the details. I do
> > >>> believe it motivated an alternative by Nick Piggin called fsblock though
> > >>> (http://lwn.net/Articles/321390/). At the very least it would be nice to
> > >>> know why neither were never merged for those of us that were not around
> > >>> at the time and who may not have the chance to dive through mailing list
> > >>> archives between now and March.
> > >>>
> > >>> FWIW, I would expect that a show-stopper for any proposal is requiring
> > >>> high-order allocations to succeed for the system to behave correctly.
> > >>>
> > >> My memory is that Nick's work just didn't have the momentum to get
> > >> pushed in.  It all seemed very reasonable though, I think our hatred of
> > >> buffered heads just wasn't yet bigger than the fear of moving away.
> > >>
> > >> But, the bigger question is how big are the blocks going to be?  At some
> > >> point (64K?) we might as well just make a log structured dm target and
> > >> have a single setup for both shingled and large sector drives.
> > > There is no real point.  Even with 4k drives today using 4k sectors in
> > > the filesystem, we still get 512 byte writes because of journalling and
> > > the buffer cache.
> > 
> > I think that you are wrong here James. Even with 512 byte drives, the IO's we 
> > send down tend to be 4k or larger. Do you have traces that show this and details?
> 
> It's mostly an ext3 journalling issue ... and it's only metadata and
> mostly the ioschedulers can elevate it into 4k chunks, so yes, most of
> our writes are 4k+, so this is a red herring, yes.
  ext3 (similarly as ext4) does block level journalling meaning that it
journals *only* full blocks. So an ext3/4 filesystem with 4 KB blocksize
will never journal anything else than full 4 KB blocks. So I'm not sure
where this 512-byte writes idea came from..

> > Also keep in mind that larger block sizes allow us to track larger
> > files with 
> > smaller amounts of metadata which is a second win.
> 
> Larger file block sizes are completely independent from larger device
> block sizes (we can have 16k file block sizes on 4k or even 512b
> devices).  The questions on larger block size devices are twofold:
> 
>      1. If manufacturers tell us that they'll only support I/O on the
>         physical sector size, do we believe them, given that they said
>         this before on 4k and then backed down.  All the logical vs
>         physical sector stuff is now in T10 standards, why would they
>         try to go all physical again, especially as they've now all
>         written firmware that does the necessary RMW?
>      2. If we agree they'll do RMW in Firmware again, what do we have to
>         do to take advantage of larger sector sizes beyond what we
>         currently do in alignment and chunking?  There may still be
>         issues in FS journal and data layouts.
  I also believe drives will support smaller-than-blocksize writes. But
supporting larger fs blocksize can sometimes be beneficial for other
reasons (think performance with specialized workloads because amount of
metadata is smaller, fragmentation is smaller, ...). Currently ocfs2, ext4,
and possibly others go through the hoops to support allocating file data in
chunks larger than fs blocksize - at the first sight that should be
straightforward but if you look at the code you find out there are nasty
corner cases which make it pretty ugly. And each fs doing these large data
allocations currently invents its own way to deal with the problems. So
providing some common infrastructure for dealing with blocks larger than
page size would definitely relieve some pain.

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

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Christoph Lameter]

On Wed, 22 Jan 2014, Mel Gorman wrote:

> Large block support was proposed years ago by Christoph Lameter
> (http://lwn.net/Articles/232757/). I think I was just getting started
> in the community at the time so I do not recall any of the details. I do
> believe it motivated an alternative by Nick Piggin called fsblock though
> (http://lwn.net/Articles/321390/). At the very least it would be nice to
> know why neither were never merged for those of us that were not around
> at the time and who may not have the chance to dive through mailing list
> archives between now and March.

It was rejected first because of the necessity of higher order page
allocations. Nick and I then added ways to virtually map higher order
pages if the page allocator could no longe provide those.

All of this required changes to the basic page cache operations. I added a
way for the mapping to indicate an order for an address range and then
modified the page cache operations to be able to operate on any order
pages.

The patchset that introduced the ability to specify different orders for
the pagecache address ranges was not accepted by Andrew because he thought
there was no chance for the rest of the modifications to become
acceptable.

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Mel Gorman]

On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 02:47:10PM -0600, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Wed, 22 Jan 2014, Mel Gorman wrote:
> 
> > Large block support was proposed years ago by Christoph Lameter
> > (http://lwn.net/Articles/232757/). I think I was just getting started
> > in the community at the time so I do not recall any of the details. I do
> > believe it motivated an alternative by Nick Piggin called fsblock though
> > (http://lwn.net/Articles/321390/). At the very least it would be nice to
> > know why neither were never merged for those of us that were not around
> > at the time and who may not have the chance to dive through mailing list
> > archives between now and March.
> 
> It was rejected first because of the necessity of higher order page
> allocations. Nick and I then added ways to virtually map higher order
> pages if the page allocator could no longe provide those.
> 

That'd be okish for 64-bit at least although it would show up as
degraded performance in some cases when virtually contiguous buffers were
used. Aside from the higher setup, access costs and teardown costs of a
virtual contiguous buffer, the underlying storage would no longer gets
a single buffer as part of the IO request. Would that not offset many of
the advantages?

-- 
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[Christoph Lameter]

On Fri, 24 Jan 2014, Mel Gorman wrote:

> That'd be okish for 64-bit at least although it would show up as
> degraded performance in some cases when virtually contiguous buffers were
> used. Aside from the higher setup, access costs and teardown costs of a
> virtual contiguous buffer, the underlying storage would no longer gets
> a single buffer as part of the IO request. Would that not offset many of
> the advantages?

It would offset some of that. But the major benefit of large order page
cache was the reduction of the number of operations that the kernel has to
perform. A 64k page contains 16 4k pages. So there is only one kernel
operation required instead of 16. If the page is virtually allocated then
the higher level kernel functions still only operate on one page struct.
The lower levels (bio) then will have to deal with the virtuall mappings
and create a scatter gather list. This is some more overhead but not much.

Doing something like this will put more stress on the defragmentation
logic in the kernel. In general I think we need more contiguous physical
memory.

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Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes

[James Bottomley]

On Tue, 2014-01-21 at 22:04 -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> One topic that has been lurking forever at the edges is the current 4k 
> limitation for file system block sizes. Some devices in production today and 
> others coming soon have larger sectors and it would be interesting to see if it 
> is time to poke at this topic again.
> 
> LSF/MM seems to be pretty much the only event of the year that most of the key 
> people will be present, so should be a great topic for a joint session.

But the question is what will the impact be.  A huge amount of fuss was
made about 512->4k.  Linux was totally ready because we had variable
block sizes and our page size is 4k.  I even have one pure 4k sector
drive that works in one of my test systems.

However, the result was the market chose to go the physical/logical
route because of other Operating System considerations, all 4k drives
expose 512 byte sectors and do RMW internally.  For us it becomes about
layout and alignment, which we already do.  I can't see how going to 8k
or 16k would be any different from what we've already done.  In other
words, this is an already solved problem.

James


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Update on LSF/MM [was Re: LSF/MM 2014 Call For Proposals]

[James Bottomley]

Hi everyone

We're about three weeks out from LSF/MM, so the PC is putting together
the agenda here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0ArurRVMVCSnkdHU2Zk1KbFhmeVZFVmFMQ19nakJYaFE&gid=0

The current list of attendees is:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0ArurRVMVCSnkdHU2Zk1KbFhmeVZFVmFMQ19nakJYaFE&gid=1

As usual, we schedule stuff in a just in time, so if you feel there are
any topics we're missing, please let us know (send an email to
lsf@lists.linux-foundation.org and cc the relevant linux list).  There's
always time to add stuff we forgot and, if the topic is very relevant,
we might even invite you to present it.

James


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