linux-ext4 - Re: [PATCH] jbd2: avoid the concurrent data writeback

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Message-ID: <20101116121323.GE4757@quack.suse.cz>
Date:	Tue, 16 Nov 2010 13:13:23 +0100
From:	Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>
To:	Feng Tang <feng.tang@...el.com>
Cc:	no To-header on input <""@suse.de>,
	"Wu, Fengguang" <fengguang.wu@...el.com>,
	"linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org" <linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org>,
	"linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org>,
	LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] jbd2: avoid the concurrent data writeback

  Hi,

  sorry for chiming in a bit late...
On Mon 15-11-10 17:59:43, Feng Tang wrote:
> From b16cfc5a560f2549ac69dbb235a550500ea1719f Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> From: Feng Tang <feng.tang@...el.com>
> Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2010 21:06:44 +0800
> Subject: [PATCH] jbd2: avoid the concurrent data writeback
> 
> When dd a big file to an ext4 partition, it is very likely to happen
> that both the background flush thread and kjounald try to do data
> writeback for it, that the flush thread is doing the writeback for
> this file and jbd2 thread are also waken up to commit the transaction.
> Because kjounald only calls the generic_writepages() whose path
> doesn't really allocate disk blocks, the ext4_witepage() may be called
> lots of times (100000+ for a 1g file dd) without really writing one page
> back (skipped), which will consume lots of unnecessary CPU time
> 
> This could be found by a simple test case with ftrace:
> $ sync;
> $ echo 40960 > buffer_size_kb;echo 1 > events/writeback/enable;echo 1 > events/jbd2/enable;echo 1 > events/ext4/enable;
> $ dd if=/dev/zero of=/home/test/1g.bin bs=1M count=1024;sync;
> $ cat trace > /home/test/jbd2_ext4_1g_dd.log
> $ grep -c wcb_writepage /home/test/jbd2_ext4_1g_dd.log
> 
> This patch will check if the inode is under data syncing, if yes then
> don't start the writeback from kjournald
> 
> The Perf statics (On my Core Duo 2 + 4G RAM + SATA disk + Ext4 in all default modes):
> before the patch >  112191  writeback:wbc_writepage  #      0.005 M/sec
> after the patch  >  54  writeback:wbc_writepage  #      0.000 M/sec
> 
> Signed-off-by: Feng Tang <feng.tang@...el.com>
> ---
>  fs/jbd2/commit.c |   11 +++++++++++
>  1 files changed, 11 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
> 
> diff --git a/fs/jbd2/commit.c b/fs/jbd2/commit.c
> index f3ad159..0f3e356 100644
> --- a/fs/jbd2/commit.c
> +++ b/fs/jbd2/commit.c
> @@ -170,6 +170,10 @@ static int journal_wait_on_commit_record(journal_t *journal,
>   * We don't do block allocation here even for delalloc. We don't
>   * use writepages() because with dealyed allocation we may be doing
>   * block allocation in writepages().
> + *
> + * Sometimes when this get called, the host inode may be under data
> + * syncing initiated by flush thread(especially for a large file), and 
> + * in such situation, we should skip this path of writeback
>   */
>  static int journal_submit_inode_data_buffers(struct address_space *mapping)
>  {
> @@ -181,6 +185,13 @@ static int journal_submit_inode_data_buffers(struct address_space *mapping)
>  		.range_end = i_size_read(mapping->host),
>  	};
>  
> +	spin_lock(&inode_lock);
> +	if (mapping->host->i_state & I_SYNC) {
> +		spin_unlock(&inode_lock);
> +		return 0;
> +	}
> +	spin_unlock(&inode_lock);
> +
  Sorry, but this is just wrong. Not only because of inode_lock as
Christoph pointed out but mainly principially. ext4 and ocfs2 in
data=ordered mode rely on data pages (with underlying blocks already
allocated) being written out before transaction commit proceeds for data
integrity. So you cannot just go and remove the writeback saying it
improves performance.

I'm not saying that ext4 handling of ordered mode does not need a revision
(we actually talked with Ted about it at Kernel Summit). But the solution
for it is to use IO completion callback to do extent tree manipulations
and stop using JBD2 for data syncing. We already do that for direct IO and
conversion of preallocated space so doing it in all cases should be
reasonably easy. Until that happens, you can run ext4 in data=writeback
mode which will also stop JBD2 from doing the writeback (and effectively is
rather similar to your patch).

								Honza
-- 
Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>
SUSE Labs, CR
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