Re: [PATCH 0/3] remove rw_page() from brd, pmem and btt

Jens Axboe
2017-08-03T21:17:09Z

On 08/03/2017 03:13 PM, Ross Zwisler wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 03, 2017 at 09:13:15AM +0900, Minchan Kim wrote:
>> Hi Ross,
>>
>> On Wed, Aug 02, 2017 at 04:13:59PM -0600, Ross Zwisler wrote:
>>> On Fri, Jul 28, 2017 at 10:31:43AM -0700, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
>>>> On Fri, Jul 28, 2017 at 10:56:01AM -0600, Ross Zwisler wrote:
>>>>> Dan Williams and Christoph Hellwig have recently expressed doubt about
>>>>> whether the rw_page() interface made sense for synchronous memory drivers
>>>>> [1][2]. It's unclear whether this interface has any performance benefit
>>>>> for these drivers, but as we continue to fix bugs it is clear that it does
>>>>> have a maintenance burden. This series removes the rw_page()
>>>>> implementations in brd, pmem and btt to relieve this burden.
>>>>
>>>> Why don't you measure whether it has performance benefits? I don't
>>>> understand why zram would see performance benefits and not other drivers.
>>>> If it's going to be removed, then the whole interface should be removed,
>>>> not just have the implementations removed from some drivers.
>>>
>>> Okay, I've run a bunch of performance tests with the PMEM and with BTT entry
>>> points for rw_pages() in a swap workload, and in all cases I do see an
>>> improvement over the code when rw_pages() is removed. Here are the results
>>> from my random lab box:
>>>
>>> Average latency of swap_writepage()
>>> +------+------------+---------+-------------+
>>> | | no rw_page | rw_page | Improvement |
>>> +-------------------------------------------+
>>> | PMEM | 5.0 us | 4.7 us | 6% |
>>> +-------------------------------------------+
>>> | BTT | 6.8 us | 6.1 us | 10% |
>>> +------+------------+---------+-------------+
>>>
>>> Average latency of swap_readpage()
>>> +------+------------+---------+-------------+
>>> | | no rw_page | rw_page | Improvement |
>>> +-------------------------------------------+
>>> | PMEM | 3.3 us | 2.9 us | 12% |
>>> +-------------------------------------------+
>>> | BTT | 3.7 us | 3.4 us | 8% |
>>> +------+------------+---------+-------------+
>>>
>>> The workload was pmbench, a memory benchmark, run on a system where I had
>>> severely restricted the amount of memory in the system with the 'mem' kernel
>>> command line parameter. The benchmark was set up to test more memory than I
>>> allowed the OS to have so it spilled over into swap.
>>>
>>> The PMEM or BTT device was set up as my swap device, and during the test I got
>>> a few hundred thousand samples of each of swap_writepage() and
>>> swap_writepage(). The PMEM/BTT device was just memory reserved with the
>>> memmap kernel command line parameter.
>>>
>>> Thanks, Matthew, for asking for performance data. It looks like removing this
>>> code would have been a mistake.
>>
>> By suggestion of Christoph Hellwig, I made a quick patch which does IO without
>> dynamic bio allocation for swap IO. Actually, it's not formal patch to be
>> worth to send mainline yet but I believe it's enough to test the improvement.
>>
>> Could you test patchset on pmem and btt without rw_page?
>>
>> For working the patch, block drivers need to declare it's synchronous IO
>> device via BDI_CAP_SYNC but if it's hard, you can just make every swap IO
>> comes from (sis->flags & SWP_SYNC_IO) with removing condition check
>>
>> if (!(sis->flags & SWP_SYNC_IO)) in swap_[read|write]page.
>>
>> Patchset is based on 4.13-rc3.
>
> Thanks for the patch, here are the updated results from my test box:
>
> Average latency of swap_writepage()
> +------+------------+---------+---------+
> | | no rw_page | minchan | rw_page |
> +----------------------------------------
> | PMEM | 5.0 us | 4.98 us | 4.7 us |
> +----------------------------------------
> | BTT | 6.8 us | 6.3 us | 6.1 us |
> +------+------------+---------+---------+
>
> Average latency of swap_readpage()
> +------+------------+---------+---------+
> | | no rw_page | minchan | rw_page |
> +----------------------------------------
> | PMEM | 3.3 us | 3.27 us | 2.9 us |
> +----------------------------------------
> | BTT | 3.7 us | 3.44 us | 3.4 us |
> +------+------------+---------+---------+
>
> I've added another digit in precision in some cases to help differentiate the
> various results.
>
> In all cases your patches did perform better than with the regularly allocated
> BIO, but again for all cases the rw_page() path was the fastest, even if only
> marginally.

IMHO, the win needs to be pretty substantial to justify keeping a
parallel read/write path in the kernel. The recent work of making
O_DIRECT faster is exactly the same as what Minchan did here for sync
IO. I would greatly prefer one fast path, instead of one fast and one
that's just a little faster for some things. It's much better to get
everyone behind one path/stack, and make that as fast as it can be.

--
Jens Axboe