Date:	Tue, 12 Apr 2011 22:22:48 +1000
From:	Dave Chinner <david@...morbit.com>
To:	Jens Axboe <jaxboe@...ionio.com>
Cc:	"hch@...radead.org" <hch@...radead.org>, NeilBrown <neilb@...e.de>,
	Mike Snitzer <snitzer@...hat.com>,
	"linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	"dm-devel@...hat.com" <dm-devel@...hat.com>,
	"linux-raid@...r.kernel.org" <linux-raid@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 05/10] block: remove per-queue plugging

On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 10:36:30AM +0200, Jens Axboe wrote:
> On 2011-04-12 03:12, hch@...radead.org wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 02:48:45PM +0200, Jens Axboe wrote:
> >> Great, once you do that and XFS kills the blk_flush_plug() calls too,
> >> then we can remove that export and make it internal only.
> > 
> > Linus pulled the tree, so they are gone now.  Btw, there's still some
> > bits in the area that confuse me:
> 
> Great!
> 
> >  - what's the point of the queue_sync_plugs?  It has a lot of comment
> >    that seem to pre-data the onstack plugging, but except for that
> >    it's trivial wrapper around blk_flush_plug, with an argument
> >    that is not used.
> 
> There's really no point to it anymore. It's existance was due to the
> older revision that had to track write requests for serializaing around
> a barrier. I'll kill it, since we don't do that anymore.
> 
> >  - is there a good reason for the existance of __blk_flush_plug?  You'd
> >    get one additional instruction in the inlined version of
> >    blk_flush_plug when opencoding, but avoid the need for chained
> >    function calls.
> >  - Why is having a plug in blk_flush_plug marked unlikely?  Note that
> >    unlikely is the static branch prediction hint to mark the case
> >    extremly unlikely and is even used for hot/cold partitioning.  But
> >    when we call it we usually check beforehand if we actually have
> >    plugs, so it's actually likely to happen.
> 
> The existance and out-of-line is for the scheduler() hook. It should be
> an unlikely event to schedule with a plug held, normally the plug should
> have been explicitly unplugged before that happens.

Though if it does, haven't you just added a significant amount of
depth to the worst case stack usage? I'm seeing this sort of thing
from io_schedule():

        Depth    Size   Location    (40 entries)
        -----    ----   --------
  0)     4256      16   mempool_alloc_slab+0x15/0x20
  1)     4240     144   mempool_alloc+0x63/0x160
  2)     4096      16   scsi_sg_alloc+0x4c/0x60
  3)     4080     112   __sg_alloc_table+0x66/0x140
  4)     3968      32   scsi_init_sgtable+0x33/0x90
  5)     3936      48   scsi_init_io+0x31/0xc0
  6)     3888      32   scsi_setup_fs_cmnd+0x79/0xe0
  7)     3856     112   sd_prep_fn+0x150/0xa90
  8)     3744      48   blk_peek_request+0x6a/0x1f0
  9)     3696      96   scsi_request_fn+0x60/0x510
 10)     3600      32   __blk_run_queue+0x57/0x100
 11)     3568      80   flush_plug_list+0x133/0x1d0
 12)     3488      32   __blk_flush_plug+0x24/0x50
 13)     3456      32   io_schedule+0x79/0x80

(This is from a page fault on ext3 that is doing page cache
readahead and blocking on a locked buffer.)

I've seen traces where mempool_alloc_slab enters direct reclaim
which adds another 1.5k of stack usage to this path. So I'm
extremely concerned that you've just reduced the stack available to
every thread by at least 2.5k of space...

Cheers,

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