Re: [PATCH v3 3/3] NFSD: Add support for encoding multiple segments

From: "J. Bruce Fields" <bfields@fieldses.org>
To: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: linux-nfs@vger.kernel.org, xfs@oss.sgi.com,
	Marc Eshel <eshel@us.ibm.com>,
	Anna Schumaker <Anna.Schumaker@netapp.com>,
	linux-nfs-owner@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 3/3] NFSD: Add support for encoding multiple segments
Date: Fri, 20 Mar 2015 14:26:21 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20150320182621.GH2036@fieldses.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20150320162303.GA18786@infradead.org>

On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 09:23:03AM -0700, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 11:17:18AM -0400, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
> > Maybe this is a question for xfs developers.
> > 
> > So, we have a new READ_PLUS call that's basically just a version of READ
> > optimized for sparse files:
> > 
> > 	http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-nfsv4-minorversion2-33#section-15.10
> > 
> > It allows an NFS server to return either file data (like a normal READ
> > call) or, at the server's discretion, records saying "this range of the
> > data is all zeroes".
> > 
> > Anna tried implementing READ_PLUS for knfsd using
> > vfs_llseek(.,.,SEEK_HOLE) followed by an ordinary read if that
> > determines we're not at a hole.
> > 
> > (Very) preliminary results suggest that's slower than a plain READ for
> > an xfs file with no holes.  (And *much* slower in the ext4 case for some
> > reason.)
> 
> It should be a fairly cheap operastion, and does extent tree operations
> that are pretty similar to an (uncached) read.  Do you have profiles?
> 
> > Is that expected, and should we be doing this some other way instead?
> 
> Are the read cached or uncached?

I don't know, and don't have profiles.  I'll either try to reproduce or
wait till Anna's back from vacation.

> If they are from pagecache just copying the zeroes is pretty much
> unbeatable compared to extent tree lookups, so we'd need a new page
> flag (difficult..) to see that a page is a hole (and then it would
> only work for the whole page), but for uncached reads an optimization
> would be to tell a read that it's an NFS READ_PLUS so that it could
> just read until it reach a hole, and then we'd need some way to
> communicate the hole size (or just fall back to SEEK_HOLE for that
> case).

Ugh, OK.  We'll do some more tests before coming back to ask about
that....

--b.

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