Re: Request: I/O request recording

[Bart Samwel <bart@samwel.tk>]

Andrew Morton wrote:
> Bart Samwel <bart@samwel.tk> wrote:
> 
>>>Linux caches disk data on a per-file basis.  So if you preload pagecache
>>>via the /dev/hda1 "file", that is of no benefit to the /etc/passwd file. 
>>>Each one has its own unique pagecache.  When reading pages for /etc/passwd
>>>we don't go looking for the same disk blocks in the cache of /dev/hda1.
>>>
>>>Which is why the userspace cache preloading needs to know the pathnames of
>>>all the relevant files - it needs to open and read each one, applying
>>>knowledge of disk layout while doing it.
>>
>>Hmmm, that explains why this didn't work. :( So if I wanted to do this 
>>completely from user space using only block_dump data I'd probably have 
>>to go through all files and find out if they had any blocks in common 
>>with my preload set -- presuming there is a way to find that out, which 
>>there probably isn't. That  makes this idea pretty much useless, I'm 
>>sorry to have bothered you with it.
> 
> You could certainly do that.  Given disk block #N you need to search all
> files on the disk asking "who owns this block".  The FIBMAP ioctl can be
> used on most filesystems (ext2, ext3, others..) to find out which blocks a
> file is using.   See bmap.c in
> 
> http://www.zip.com.au/~akpm/linux/patches/stuff/ext3-tools.tar.gz
> 
> Unfortunately you cannot determine a directory's blocks in this way. 
> Ext3's directories live in the /dev/hda1 pagecache anyway.  ext2's
> directories each have their own pagecache.

I found out two things while trying to do this:

1. Many filesystems in linux set f_fsid to zero for statfs. I was trying 
to use this to skip over mount points, but that doesn't work. Had to use 
the st_dev field from stat instead. :(

2. Swapfiles apparently don't like to be touched. I did an 
ioctl(FIGETBSZ) on a swapfile, and it would simply block until I did a 
swapoff on the file. I didn't even get to the FIBMAP part. :( Is this 
correct behaviour? And is there any way to detect this so that I can 
work around it?

-- Bart