Re: libata FUA revisited

Tejun Heo
2007-02-21T08:57:46Z

Jens Axboe wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 21 2007, Tejun Heo wrote:
>> [cc'ing Ric, Hannes and Dongjun, Hello. Feel free to drag other people in.]
>>
>> Robert Hancock wrote:
>>> Jens Axboe wrote:
>>>> But we can't really change that, since you need the cache flushed before
>>>> issuing the FUA write. I've been advocating for an ordered bit for
>>>> years, so that we could just do:
>>>>
>>>> 3. w/FUA+ORDERED
>>>>
>>>> normal operation -> barrier issued -> write barrier FUA+ORDERED
>>>> -> normal operation resumes
>>>>
>>>> So we don't have to serialize everything both at the block and device
>>>> level. I would have made FUA imply this already, but apparently it's not
>>>> what MS wanted FUA for, so... The current implementations take the FUA
>>>> bit (or WRITE FUA) as a hint to boost it to head of queue, so you are
>>>> almost certainly going to jump ahead of already queued writes. Which we
>>>> of course really do not.
>> Yeah, I think if we have tagged write command and flush tagged (or
>> barrier tagged) things can be pretty efficient. Again, I'm much more
>> comfortable with separate opcodes for those rather than bits changing
>> the behavior.
>
> ORDERED+FUA NCQ would still be preferable to an NCQ enabled flush
> command, though.

I think we're talking about two different things here.

1. The barrier write (FUA write) combined with flush. I think it would
help improving the performance but I think issuing two commands
shouldn't be too slower than issuing one combined command unless it
causes extra physical activity (moving head, etc...).

2. FLUSH currently flushes all writes. If we can mark certain commands
requiring ordering, we can selectively flush or order necessary writes.
(No need to flush 16M buffer all over the disk when only journal needs
barriering)

>> Another idea Dongjun talked about while drinking in LSF was ranged
>> flush. Not as flexible/efficient as the previous option but much less
>> intrusive and should help quite a bit, I think.
>
> But that requires extensive tracking, I'm not so sure the implementation
> of that for barriers would be very clean. It'd probably be good for
> fsync, though.

I was mostly thinking about journal area. Using it for other purposes
would incur a lot of complexity. :-(

--
tejun