XFS status update for August 2010

XFS status update for August 2010

[Christoph Hellwig]

At the first of August we finally saw the release of Linux 2.6.35,
which includes a large XFS update.  The most prominent feature in
Linux 2.6.35 is the new delayed logging code which provides massive
speedups for metadata-intensive workloads, but there has been
a large amount of other fixes and cleanups, leading to the following
diffstat:

	 67 files changed, 4426 insertions(+), 3835 deletions(-)

Given the early release of Linux 2.6.35 the merge window for the
next release fully fell into the month of August.  The XFS updates
for Linux 2.6.36 include various additional performance improvements
in the delayed logging code, for direct I/O writes and for avoiding
synchronous transactions, as well as various fixed and large amount
of cleanups, including the removal of the remaining dead DMAPI
code.

On the userspace side we saw the 3.1.3 release of xfsprogs, which includes
various smaller fixes, support for the new XFS_IOC_ZERO_RANGE ioctl and
Debian packaging updates.  The xfstests package saw one new test case
and a couple of smaller patches, and xfsdump has not seen any updates at
all.

The XMLified versions of the XFS users guide, training labs and filesystem
structure documentation are now available as on the fly generated html on
the xfs.org website and can be found at:

	http://www.xfs.org/index.php/XFS_Papers_and_Documentation

Re: XFS status update for August 2010

[Willy Tarreau]

Hi Christoph,

On Thu, Sep 02, 2010 at 10:59:59AM -0400, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> At the first of August we finally saw the release of Linux 2.6.35,
> which includes a large XFS update.  The most prominent feature in
> Linux 2.6.35 is the new delayed logging code which provides massive
> speedups for metadata-intensive workloads, but there has been
> a large amount of other fixes and cleanups, leading to the following
> diffstat:
> 
> 	 67 files changed, 4426 insertions(+), 3835 deletions(-)
> 
> Given the early release of Linux 2.6.35 the merge window for the
> next release fully fell into the month of August.  The XFS updates
> for Linux 2.6.36 include various additional performance improvements
> in the delayed logging code, for direct I/O writes and for avoiding
> synchronous transactions, as well as various fixed and large amount
> of cleanups, including the removal of the remaining dead DMAPI
> code.

This is very good news. I have XFS on my laptop and I regret I have
installed it there, because working on the kernel is very painful with
it. A "cp -al $old_dir $new_dir" takes about 1 minute while it takes
approximatively one second on reiserfs. I've just installed 2.6.35.4
and did not notice any improvement. However, I'm clearly interested
in testing any possible pending code that you think should improve
this behaviour by delaying log writes.

So if you have any pointer to recommended patches or a git tree (based
on an kernel reliable enough for a laptop used for work), I'd be
interested in trying them.

Regards,
Willy