Re: [PATCH 2/2] fs: generic_file_buffered_read() now uses find_get_pages_contig

Kent Overstreet
2020-06-10T01:46:35Z

On Tue, Jun 09, 2020 at 06:38:08PM -0700, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 09, 2020 at 08:10:36PM -0400, Kent Overstreet wrote:
> > Convert generic_file_buffered_read() to get pages to read from in
> > batches, and then copy data to userspace from many pages at once - in
> > particular, we now don't touch any cachelines that might be contended
> > while we're in the loop to copy data to userspace.
> >
> > This is is a performance improvement on workloads that do buffered reads
> > with large blocksizes, and a very large performance improvement if that
> > file is also being accessed concurrently by different threads.
>
> Hey, you're stealing my performance improvements!

:)

> Granted, I haven't got to doing performance optimisations (certainly
> not in this function), but this is one of the places where THP in the
> page cache will have a useful performance improvement.
>
> I'm not opposed to putting this in, but I may back it out as part of
> the THP work because the THPs will get the same performance improvements
> that you're seeing here with less code.

I'm an _enthusiastic_ supporter of the THP stuff (as you know), but my feeling
is that it's going to be a long time before hugepages are everywhere - and I
think even with the pagevec stuff generic_file_buffered_read() is somewhat
easier to read and deal with after this series than before it.

Though I could see the pagevec stuff making hugepage support a pain, so there is
that. Eh.