Re: [RFC PATCH 0/5] Enable use of Solid State Hybrid Drives

Pavel Machek
2014-12-03T15:25:49Z

On Thu 2014-10-30 07:14:17, Dave Chinner wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 11:23:38AM -0700, Jason B. Akers wrote:
> > The following series enables the use of Solid State hybrid drives
> > ATA standard 3.2 defines the hybrid information feature, which provides a means for the host driver to provide hints to the SSHDs to guide what to place on the SSD/NAND portion and what to place on the magnetic media.
> >
> > This implementation allows user space applications to provide the cache hints to the kernel using the existing ionice syscall.
> >
> > An application can pass a priority number coding up bits 11, 12, and 15 of the ionice command to form a 3 bit field that encodes the following priorities:
> > OPRIO_ADV_NONE,
> > IOPRIO_ADV_EVICT, /* actively discard cached data */
> > IOPRIO_ADV_DONTNEED, /* caching this data has little value */
> > IOPRIO_ADV_NORMAL, /* best-effort cache priority (default) */
> > IOPRIO_ADV_RESERVED1, /* reserved for future use */
> > IOPRIO_ADV_RESERVED2,
> > IOPRIO_ADV_RESERVED3,
> > IOPRIO_ADV_WILLNEED, /* high temporal locality */
> >
> > For example the following commands from the user space will make dd IOs to be generated with a hint of IOPRIO_ADV_DONTNEED assuming the SSHD is /dev/sdc.
> >
> > ionice -c2 -n4096 dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=1M count=1024
> > ionice -c2 -n4096 dd if=/dev/sdc of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024
>
> This looks to be the wrong way to implement per-IO priority
> information.
>
> How does a filesystem make use of this to make sure it's
> metadata ends up with IOPRIO_ADV_WILLNEED to store frequently
> accessed metadata in flash. Conversely, journal writes need to
> be issued with IOPRIO_ADV_DONTNEED so they don't unneceessarily
> consume flash space as they are never-read IOs...

Well, that makes sense, but we still want some kind of per-application
priority.

I'd like ~/.chromium directory cached in the SSD part, but I don't
neccessarily want /data/backup directory cached in the SSD...

Pavel

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