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

Minchan Kim
2017-08-16T04:48:03Z

Hi Jens,

On Mon, Aug 14, 2017 at 10:17:09AM -0600, Jens Axboe wrote:
> 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.

Looks promising.
If recycling bio works well enough, I think we don't need to introduce
new split in the path for on-stack bio.
I will test your version on zram-swap!

Thanks.