Re: [PATCH 6/6] xfs: online scrub needn't bother zeroing its temporary buffer

Brian Foster
2019-07-05T14:52:48Z

On Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 01:47:10PM -0700, Darrick J. Wong wrote:
> From: Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com>
>
> The xattr scrubber functions use the temporary memory buffer either for
> storing bitmaps or for testing if attribute value extraction works. The
> bitmap code always zeroes what it needs and the value extraction merely
> sets the buffer contents (we never read the contents, we just look for
> return codes), so it's not necessary to waste CPU time zeroing on
> allocation.
>

If we don't need to zero the buffer because we never look at the result,
that suggests we don't need to populate it in the first place right?

> A flame graph analysis showed that we were spending 7% of a xfs_scrub
> run (the whole program, not just the attr scrubber itself) allocating
> and zeroing 64k segments needlessly.
>

How much does this patch help?

> Signed-off-by: Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com>
> ---
> fs/xfs/scrub/attr.c | 7 ++++++-
> 1 file changed, 6 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
>
>
> diff --git a/fs/xfs/scrub/attr.c b/fs/xfs/scrub/attr.c
> index 09081d8ab34b..d3a6f3dacf0d 100644
> --- a/fs/xfs/scrub/attr.c
> +++ b/fs/xfs/scrub/attr.c
> @@ -64,7 +64,12 @@ xchk_setup_xattr_buf(
> sc->buf = NULL;
> }
>
> - ab = kmem_zalloc_large(sizeof(*ab) + sz, flags);
> + /*
> + * Allocate the big buffer. We skip zeroing it because that added 7%
> + * to the scrub runtime and all the users were careful never to read
> + * uninitialized contents.
> + */

Ok, that suggests the 7% hit was due to zeroing (where the commit log
says "allocating and zeroing"). Either way, we probably don't need such
details in the code. Can we tweak the comment to something like:

/*
* Don't zero the buffer on allocation to avoid runtime overhead. All
* users must be careful never to read uninitialized contents.
*/

With that:

Reviewed-by: Brian Foster <bfoster@redhat.com>

> + ab = kmem_alloc_large(sizeof(*ab) + sz, flags);
> if (!ab)
> return -ENOMEM;
>
>