Re: [PATCH v1 2/6] fs: use on-stack-bio if backing device has BDI_CAP_SYNC capability

Jens Axboe
2017-08-14T14:36:00Z

On 08/14/2017 02:50 AM, Minchan Kim wrote:
> Hi Jens,
>
> On Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 08:26:59AM -0600, Jens Axboe wrote:
>> On 08/11/2017 04:46 AM, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>>> On Wed, Aug 09, 2017 at 08:06:24PM -0700, Dan Williams wrote:
>>>> I like it, but do you think we should switch to sbvec[<constant>] to
>>>> preclude pathological cases where nr_pages is large?
>>>
>>> Yes, please.
>>>
>>> Then I'd like to see that the on-stack bio even matters for
>>> mpage_readpage / mpage_writepage. Compared to all the buffer head
>>> overhead the bio allocation should not actually matter in practice.
>>
>> I'm skeptical for that path, too. I also wonder how far we could go
>> with just doing a per-cpu bio recycling facility, to reduce the cost
>> of having to allocate a bio. The on-stack bio parts are fine for
>> simple use case, where simple means that the patch just special
>> cases the allocation, and doesn't have to change much else.
>>
>> I had a patch for bio recycling and batched freeing a year or two
>> ago, I'll see if I can find and resurrect it.
>
> So, you want to go with per-cpu bio recycling approach to
> remove rw_page?
>
> So, do you want me to hold this patchset?

I don't want to hold this series up, but I do think the recycling is
a cleaner approach since we don't need to special case anything. I
hope I'll get some time to dust it off, retest, and post soon.

--
Jens Axboe

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