linux-ext4 - Re: [BUG][ext2] XIP does not work on ext2

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Date:	Thu, 7 Nov 2013 22:07:15 +0100
From:	Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>
To:	Andiry Xu <andiry@...il.com>
Cc:	Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>, Wang Shilong <wangsl-fnst@...fujitsu.com>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org,
	Andiry Xu <andiry.xu@...il.com>
Subject: Re: [BUG][ext2] XIP does not work on ext2

On Thu 07-11-13 12:14:13, Andiry Xu wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 1:18 PM, Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz> wrote:
> > On Tue 05-11-13 17:28:35, Andiry Xu wrote:
> >> >> Do you know the reason why write() outperforms mmap() in some cases? I
> >> >> know it's not related the thread but I really appreciate if you can
> >> >> answer my question.
> >> >   Well, I'm not completely sure. mmap()ed memory always works on page-by-page
> >> > basis - you first access the page, it gets faulted in and you can further
> >> > access it. So for small (sub page size) accesses this is a win because you
> >> > don't have an overhead of syscall and fs write path. For accesses larger
> >> > than page size the overhead of syscall and some initial checks is well
> >> > hidden by other things. I guess write() ends up being more efficient
> >> > because write path taken for each page is somewhat lighter than full page
> >> > fault. But you'd need to look into perf data to get some hard numbers on
> >> > where the time is spent.
> >> >
> >>
> >> Thanks for the reply. However I have filled up the whole RAM disk
> >> before doing the test, i.e. asked the brd driver to allocate all the
> >> pages initially.
> >   Well, pages in ramdisk are always present, that's not an issue. But you
> > will get a page fault to map a particular physical page in process'
> > virtual address space when you first access that virtual address in the
> > mapping from the process. The cost of setting up this virtual->physical
> > mapping is what I'm talking about.
> >
> 
> Yes, you are right, there are page faults observed with perf. I
> misunderstood page fault as copying pages between backing store and
> physical memory.
> 
> > If you had a process which first mmaps the file and writes to all pages in
> > the mapping and *then* measure the cost of another round of writing to the
> > mapping, I would expect you should see speeds close to those of memory bus.
> >
> 
> I've tried this as well. mmap() performance improves but still not as
> good as write().
> I used the perf report to compare write() and mmap() applications. For
> write() version, top of perf report shows as:
> 33.33%  __copy_user_nocache
> 4.72%    ext2_get_blocks
> 4.42%    mutex_unlock
> 3.59%    __find_get_block
> 
> which looks reasonable.
> 
> However, for mmap() version, the perf report looks strange:
> 94.98% libc-2.15.so       [.] 0x000000000014698d
> 2.25%   page_fault
> 0.18%   handle_mm_fault
> 
> I don't know what the first item is but it took the majority of cycles.
  The first item means that it's some userspace code in libc. My guess
would be that it's libc's memcpy() function (or whatever you use to write
to mmap). How do you access the mmap?

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