Re: [RFC][PATCH] dm: improve read performance

[Nikanth Karthikesan <knikanth@suse.de>]

On Monday, March 07, 2011 03:40:01 pm Mustafa Mesanovic wrote:
> On 12/27/2010 01:23 PM, Mustafa Mesanovic wrote:
> > On Mon December 27 2010 12:54:59 Neil Brown wrote:
> >> On Mon, 27 Dec 2010 12:19:55 +0100 Mustafa Mesanovic
> >> 
> >> <mume@linux.vnet.ibm.com>  wrote:
> >>> From: Mustafa Mesanovic<mume@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
> >>> 
> >>> A short explanation in prior: in this case we have "stacked" dm
> >>> devices. Two multipathed luns combined together to one striped logical
> >>> volume.
> >>> 
> >>> I/O throughput degradation happens at __bio_add_page when bio's get
> >>> checked upon max_sectors. In this setup max_sectors is always set to 8
> >>> ->  what is 4KiB.
> >>> A standalone striped logical volume on luns which are not multipathed
> >>> do not have the problem: the logical volume will take over the
> >>> max_sectors from luns below.
> 
> [...]
> 
> >>> Using the patch improves read I/O up to 3x. In this specific case from
> >>> 600MiB/s up to 1800MiB/s.
> >> 
> >> and using this patch will cause IO to fail sometimes.
> >> If an IO request which is larger than a page crosses a device boundary
> >> in the underlying e.g. RAID0, the RAID0 will return an error as such
> >> things should not happen - they are prevented by merge_bvec_fn.
> >> 
> >> If merge_bvec_fn is not being honoured, then you MUST limit requests to
> >> a single entry iovec of at most one page.
> >> 
> >> NeilBrown
> > 
> > Thank you for that hint, I will try to write a merge_bvec_fn for
> > dm-stripe.c which solves the problem, if that is ok?
> > 
> > Mustafa Mesanovic
> 
> Now here my new suggestion to fix this issue, what is your opinion?
> I tested this with different setups, and it worked fine and I had
> very good performance improvements.
> 

Some minor style nitpicks.

> [RFC][PATCH] dm: improve read performance - v2
> 
> This patch adds a merge_fn for the dm stripe target. This merge_fn
> prevents dm_set_device_limits() setting the max_sectors to 4KiB
> (PAGE_SIZE). (As in a prior patch already mentioned.)
> Now the read performance improved up to 3x higher compared to before.
> 
> What happened before:
> I/O throughput degradation happened at __bio_add_page() when bio's got
> checked at the very beginning upon max_sectors. In this setup max_sectors
> is always set to 8. So bio's entered the dm target with a max of 4KiB.
> 
> Now dm-stripe target will have its own merge_fn so max_sectors will not
> pushed down to 8 (4KiB), and bio's can get bigger than 4KiB.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Mustafa Mesanovic<mume@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
> ---
> 
>   dm-stripe.c |   24 ++++++++++++++++++++++++
>   1 file changed, 24 insertions(+)
> 
> Index: linux-2.6/drivers/md/dm-stripe.c
> ===================================================================
> --- linux-2.6.orig/drivers/md/dm-stripe.c	2011-02-28 10:23:37.000000000
> +0100 +++ linux-2.6/drivers/md/dm-stripe.c	2011-02-28 10:24:29.000000000
> +0100 @@ -396,6 +396,29 @@
>   	blk_limits_io_opt(limits, chunk_size * sc->stripes);
>   }
> 
> +static int stripe_merge(struct dm_target *ti, struct bvec_merge_data *bvm,
> +			struct bio_vec *biovec, int max_size)
> +{
> +	struct stripe_c *sc = (struct stripe_c *) ti->private;
> +	sector_t offset, chunk;
> +	uint32_t stripe;
> +	struct request_queue *q;
> +
> +	offset = bvm->bi_sector - ti->begin;
> +	chunk = offset>>  sc->chunk_shift;
> +	stripe = sector_div(chunk, sc->stripes);
> +
> +	if (!bdev_get_queue(sc->stripe[stripe].dev->bdev)->merge_bvec_fn)
> +			return max_size;
> +
> +	bvm->bi_bdev = sc->stripe[stripe].dev->bdev;
> +	q = bdev_get_queue(bvm->bi_bdev);

Initializing q at the top would simplify the check fro merge_bvec_fn above.

> +	bvm->bi_sector = sc->stripe[stripe].physical_start +
> +			(chunk<<  sc->chunk_shift) + (offset&  sc->chunk_mask);
> +

Can this be written as

bvm->bi_sector = sc->stripe[stripe].physical_start +
			bvm->bi_sector - ti->begin;

or even better
bvm->bi_sector = sc->stripe[stripe].physical_start +
			dm_target_offset(ti, bvm->bi_sector);

>
> +	return min(max_size, q->merge_bvec_fn(q, bvm, biovec));
> +}
> +
>   static struct target_type stripe_target = {
>   	.name   = "striped",
>   	.version = {1, 3, 1},
> @@ -403,6 +426,7 @@
>   	.ctr    = stripe_ctr,
>   	.dtr    = stripe_dtr,
>   	.map    = stripe_map,
> +	.merge  = stripe_merge,
>   	.end_io = stripe_end_io,
>   	.status = stripe_status,
>   	.iterate_devices = stripe_iterate_devices,
> 
> 
> 


Reviewed-by: Nikanth Karthikesan <knikanth@suse.de>