linux-ext4 - Re: [PATCH] [RFC] Fix jbd2 to stop waking up sleeping disks on sync

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Message-ID: <20240229145858.GE272762@mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 29 Feb 2024 08:58:58 -0600
From: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@....edu>
To: Phillip Susi <phill@...susis.net>
Cc: linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] [RFC] Fix jbd2 to stop waking up sleeping disks on sync

On Thu, Feb 29, 2024 at 09:23:35AM -0500, Phillip Susi wrote:
> 
> So because no metadata changed, jbd2 will not issue a barrier to end the
> transaction?  How can we fix this then?  Is there some way that jbd2 can
> know whether file data has been written, and thus, issue the barrier to
> close the transaction?

Because no metadata changed, jbd2 will not even *start* a (jbd2)
transaction as a result of that write (overwrite) to an already
allocated data block..  Since it didn't start a jbd2 transaction for
this file system operation, there's no reason to force a jbd2
transaction to close.

(Note: this could because there *is* no currently existing open
transaction, or there might be a currently open transaction, but it's
not relevent to the activity associated with the file descriptor being
fsync'ed.)

This is a critical performance optimization, because for many database
workloads, which are overwriting existing blocks and using
fdatasync(2), there is no reason to force a jbd2 transaction commit
for every single fdatasync(2) issued by the database.  However, we
still need to send a cache flush operation so that the data block is
safely persistend onto stable storage.

Cheers,

						- Ted