Date:	Sat, 6 Feb 2010 11:39:24 +1100
From:	Dave Chinner <david@...morbit.com>
To:	Christoph Lameter <cl@...ux-foundation.org>
Cc:	tytso@....edu, Andi Kleen <andi@...stfloor.org>,
	Miklos Szeredi <miklos@...redi.hu>,
	Alexander Viro <viro@....linux.org.uk>,
	Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org>,
	Christoph Lameter <clameter@....com>,
	Rik van Riel <riel@...hat.com>,
	Pekka Enberg <penberg@...helsinki.fi>,
	akpm@...ux-foundation.org, Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@...oo.com.au>,
	Hugh Dickins <hugh@...itas.com>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: inodes: Support generic defragmentation

On Thu, Feb 04, 2010 at 10:59:26AM -0600, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Thu, 4 Feb 2010, Dave Chinner wrote:
> 
> > > Or maybe we need to have the way to track the LRU of the slab page as
> > > a whole?  Any time we touch an object on the slab page, we touch the
> > > last updatedness of the slab as a hole.
> >
> > Yes, that's pretty much what I have been trying to describe. ;)
> > (And, IIUC, what I think Nick has been trying to describe as well
> > when he's been saying we should "turn reclaim upside down".)
> >
> > It seems to me to be pretty simple to track, too, if we define pages
> > for reclaim to only be those that are full of unused objects. i.e.
> > the pages have the two states:
> >
> > 	- Active: some allocated and referenced object on the page
> > 		=> no need for LRU tracking of these
> > 	- Unused: all allocated objects on the page are not used
> > 		=> these pages are LRU tracked within the slab
> >
> > A single referenced object is enough to change the state of the
> > page from Unused to Active, and when page transitions from
> > Active to Unused is goes on the MRU end of the LRU queue.
> > Reclaim would then start with the oldest pages on the LRU....
> 
> These are describing ways of reclaim that could be implemented by the fs
> layer. The information what item is "unused" or "referenced" is a notion
> of the fs. The slab caches know only of two object states: Free or
> allocated. LRU handling of slab pages is something entirely different
> from the LRU of the inodes and dentries.

Ah, perhaps you missed my previous email in the thread about adding
a third object state to the slab - i.e. an unused state?  And an
interface (slab_object_used()/slab_object_unused()) to allow the
external uses to tell the slab about state changes of objects
on the first/last reference to the object. That would allow the
tracking as I stated above....

> > > And of course, if the inode is pinned down because it is opened and/or
> > > mmaped, then its associated dcache entry can't be freed either, so
> > > there's no point trying to trash all of its sibling dentries on the
> > > same page as that dcache entry.
> >
> > Agreed - that's why I think preventing fragemntation caused by LRU
> > reclaim is best dealt with internally to slab where both object age
> > and locality can be taken into account.
> 
> Object age is not known by the slab.

See above.

> Locality is only considered in terms
> of hardware placement (Numa nodes) not in relationship to objects of other
> caches (like inodes and dentries) or the same caches.

And that is the defficiency we've been talking about correcting! i.e
that object <-> page locality needs tobe taken into account during
reclaim. Moving used/unused knowledge into the slab where page/object
locality is known is one way of doing that....

> If we want this then we may end up with a special allocator for the
> filesystem.

I don't see why a small extension to the slab code can't fix this...

> You and I have discussed a couple of years ago to add a reference count to
> the objects of the slab allocator. Those explorations resulted in am much
> more complicated and different allocator that is geared to the needs of
> the filesystem for reclaim.

And those discussions and explorations lead to the current defrag
code. After a couple of year, I don't think that the design we came
up with back then is the best way to approach the problem - it still
has many, many flaws. We need to explore different approaches
because none of the evolutionary approaches (i.e. tack something
on the side) appear to be sufficient.

Cheers,

Dave.

> 
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-- 
Dave Chinner
david@...morbit.com
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