Re: [RFC v2] nvfs: a filesystem for persistent memory

Al Viro
2021-01-10T23:42:16Z

On Sun, Jan 10, 2021 at 04:14:55PM -0500, Mikulas Patocka wrote:

> That's a good point. I split nvfs_rw_iter to separate functions
> nvfs_read_iter and nvfs_write_iter - and inlined nvfs_rw_iter_locked into
> both of them. It improved performance by 1.3%.
>
> > Not that it had been more useful on the write side, really,
> > but that's another story (nvfs_write_pages() handling of
> > copyin is... interesting). Let's figure out what's going
> > on with the read overhead first...
> >
> > lib/iov_iter.c primitives certainly could use massage for
> > better code generation, but let's find out how much of the
> > PITA is due to those and how much comes from you fighing
> > the damn thing instead of using it sanely...
>
> The results are:
>
> read: 6.744s
> read_iter: 7.417s
> read_iter - separate read and write path: 7.321s
> Al's read_iter: 7.182s
> Al's read_iter with _copy_to_iter: 7.181s

So
* overhead of hardening stuff is noise here
* switching to more straightforward ->read_iter() cuts
the overhead by about 1/3.

Interesting... I wonder how much of that is spent in
iterate_and_advance() glue inside copy_to_iter() here. There's
certainly quite a bit of optimizations possible in those
primitives and your usecase makes a decent test for that...

Could you profile that and see where is it spending
the time, on instruction level?