Re: [PATCH 1/4] xfs: add online discard support

Lukas Czerner
2011-05-20T11:44:02Z

On Fri, 20 May 2011, Christoph Hellwig wrote:

> On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 04:53:44PM -0500, Alex Elder wrote:
> > The first is, why not support it for non-delaylog?
>
> Because:
>
> a) performance is going to suck even more horribly with the
> amount of trim commands needed, with no chance of actually
> fixing it
> b) the async discard code in patch 3 not easily applyable to
> the non-delaylog case, we'd need to keep two parallel codebases,
> one of them guaranteed to be untested.
>
> > Second, why is it a two phase operation (marking an
> > extent for discard, then doing all the discards at
> > once)? Is it just so you can do the discards without
> > holding the perag lock?
>
> Because we must prevent the allocation code from reusing an extent
> that is undergoing a discard right now to prevent corruption, thus
> we need to mark it as do not touch first.
>
> > > xfs_trans_committed_bulk(ctx->cil->xc_log->l_ailp, ctx->lv_chain,
> > > ctx->start_lsn, abort);
> > >
> > > xfs_alloc_busy_sort(&ctx->busy_extents);
> >
> > I still think sorting the list belongs inside xfs_alloc_busy_clear().
> > I see that list_sort() is not necessarily trivial for an already
> > sorted list though...
>
> It's a bad idea to do the sort twice for no good reason, and adding
> another parameter to further overload xfs_alloc_busy_clear behaviour
> doesn't seem smart either.
>
> > if (error == EOPNOTSUPP) {
> > /*
> > * Report this once per mount point somehow?
Actually, this is a good idea see https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/5/5/162. So
you will get EOPNOTSUPP *only* if the device (as a whole) does not
support discard.

> > * If so, turn off the mount option?
Not so good idea, as some people mentioned several times, you can change
the devices in dmsetup to SSD (for example) without umount and you would
like your previous mount option to work. In the opposite case, the user
just gets warning (once a day perhaps?) and its up to him to deal with
it.

Or, we can turn it of (with warning) and rely on the user to notice that
it is turned off. But I would rather not rely on that.

-Lukas

> > */
> > break;
>
> We've been through this discussion again lately with dm and ext4
> folks, and the conclusion is that EOPNOTSUPP is perfectly fine to happen
> here.
>
> > > + * performing the discard a chance to mark the extent unbusy
> > > + * and retry.
> > > + */
> > > + if (busyp->flags & XFS_ALLOC_BUSY_DISCARDED) {
> > > + spin_unlock(&pag->pagb_lock);
> > > + delay(1);
> >
> > I hate seeing calls to delay() although sometimes
> > it's the right thing to do... I don't have a feel
> > for how long a discard is likely to take so I don't
> > know whether waiting here instead would be worth
> > the effort.
>
> It's not nice, but if the block layer gets fixed and we do asynchronous
> discards it simply goes away.
>
> > If this option is to only be available for delaylog, it should
> > say so here (and maybe report that it's being ignored if it's
> > supplied with nodelaylog at mount time).
>
> ok.
>
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