linux-ext4 - EXT4 nodelalloc => back to stone age.

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Date:	Mon, 01 Apr 2013 15:06:18 +0400
From:	Dmitry Monakhov <dmonakhov@...nvz.org>
To:	ext4 development <linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org>
CC:	linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org, axboe@...nel.dk,
	Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>
Subject: EXT4 nodelalloc => back to stone age.


I've mounted ext4 with -onodelalloc on my SSD (INTEL SSDSA2CW120G3,4PC10362)
It shows numbers which are slower than HDD which was produced 15 years ago
#mount  $SCRATCH_DEV $SCRATCH_MNT -onodelalloc
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt_scratch/file bs=1M count=1024 conv=fsync,notrunc
  1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 46.7948 s, 22.9 MB/s
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt_scratch/file bs=1M count=1024 conv=fsync,notrunc
  1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 41.2717 s, 26.0 MB/s
blktrace shows horrible traces:

View attachment "trace.log" of type "text/plain" (1644 bytes)


As one can see data written from two threads dd and jbd2 on per-page basis and
jbd2 submit pages with WRITE_SYNC  i.e. we write page-by-page
synchronously :)

Exact calltrace:
journal_submit_inode_data_buffers
 wbc.sync_mode =  WB_SYNC_ALL
 ->generic_writepages
   ->write_cache_pages
     ->ext4_writepage
       ->ext4_bio_write_page
         ->io_submit_add_bh
           ->io_submit_init
             io->io_op = (wbc->sync_mode == WB_SYNC_ALL ?  WRITE_SYNC :
             WRITE);
       ->ext4_io_submit(io);

1)Do we really have to use WRITE_SYNC in case of WB_SYNC_ALL ?
  Why blk_finish_plug(&plug) which is called from generic_writepages() is
  not enough? As far as I can see this code was copy-pasted from XFS,
  also DIO also tag bio-s with WRITE_SYNC, but what happen if file
  is highly fragmented (or block device is RAID0) we will endup doing
  synchronous io.

2) Why don't we have writepages for non delalloc case ?

I want to fix (2) by implementing writepages() for non delalloc case
Once this will be done we may add new flag WB_SYNC_NOALLOC so
journal_submit_inode_data_buffers will use
__filemap_fdatawrite_range(, , , WB_SYNC_ALL| WB_SYNC_NOALLC)
which will call optimized ->ext4_writepages()