Re: [PATCH v1 2/6] fs: use on-stack-bio if backing device has BDI_CAP_SYNC capability

Jens Axboe
2017-08-14T16:17:17Z

On 08/14/2017 09:38 AM, Jens Axboe wrote:
> On 08/14/2017 09:31 AM, Minchan Kim wrote:
>>> Secondly, generally you don't have slow devices and fast devices
>>> intermingled when running workloads. That's the rare case.
>>
>> Not true. zRam is really popular swap for embedded devices where
>> one of low cost product has a really poor slow nand compared to
>> lz4/lzo [de]comression.
>
> I guess that's true for some cases. But as I said earlier, the recycling
> really doesn't care about this at all. They can happily coexist, and not
> step on each others toes.

Dusted it off, result is here against -rc5:

http://git.kernel.dk/cgit/linux-block/log/?h=cpu-alloc-cache

I'd like to split the amount of units we cache and the amount of units
we free, right now they are both CPU_ALLOC_CACHE_SIZE. This means that
once we hit that count, we free all of the, and then store the one we
were asked to free. That always keeps 1 local, but maybe it'd make more
sense to cache just free CPU_ALLOC_CACHE_SIZE/2 (or something like that)
so that we retain more than 1 per cpu in case and app preempts when
sleeping for IO and the new task on that CPU then issues IO as well.
Probably minor.

Ran a quick test on nullb0 with 32 sync readers. The test was O_DIRECT
on the block device, so I disabled the __blkdev_direct_IO_simple()
bypass. With the above branch, we get ~18.0M IOPS, and without we get
~14M IOPS. Both ran with iostats disabled, to avoid any interference
from that.

--
Jens Axboe