Date:	Thu, 30 Jul 2015 08:08:29 +1000
From:	Dave Chinner <david@...morbit.com>
To:	Ming Lei <ming.lei@...onical.com>
Cc:	Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org>,
	Jens Axboe <axboe@...nel.dk>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	"Justin M. Forbes" <jforbes@...oraproject.org>,
	Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@...hat.com>, Tejun Heo <tj@...nel.org>,
	linux-api@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH v7 4/6] block: loop: prepare for supporing direct IO

On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 07:21:47AM -0400, Ming Lei wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 4:41 AM, Dave Chinner <david@...morbit.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 03:33:52AM -0400, Ming Lei wrote:
> >> On Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 1:33 PM, Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org> wrote:
> >> > On Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 05:53:33AM -0400, Ming Lei wrote:
> >> >> Because size has to be 4k aligned too.
> >> >
> >> > Yes.  But again I don't see any reason to limit us to a hardcoded 512
> >> > byte block size here, especially considering the patches to finally
> >>
> >> From loop block's view, the request size can be any count of 512-byte
> >> sectors, then the transfer size to backing device can't  guarantee to be
> >> 4k aligned always.
> >
> > In theory, yes. In practise, doesn't happen very often.
> >
> >> > allow enabling other block sizes from userspace.
> >>
> >> I have some questions about the patchset, and looks the author doesn't
> >> reply it yet.
> >>
> >> On Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 6:06 PM, Dave Chinner <david@...morbit.com> wrote:
> >> >> Because size has to be 4k aligned too.
> >> >
> >> > So check that, too. Any >= 4k block size filesystem should be doing
> >> > mostly 4k aligned and sized IO...
> >>
> >> I guess you mean we only use direct IO for the 4k aligned and sized IO?
> >> If so, that won't be efficient because the page cache has to be flushed
> >> during the switch.
> >
> > It will be extremely rare for a 4k block size filesystem to do
> > anything other than 4k aligned and sized IO. Think about it for a
> > minute: what does the page cache do to unaligned IO patterns (i.e.
> > buffered IO)?  It does IO in page sizes, and so if the application
> > if doing badly aligned or sized IO with buffered IO, then the
> > underlying device will only ever size page sized and aligned IO.
> >
> > Hence sector aligned IO will only come from applications doing
> > direct IO.  If the application is doing direct IO and it's not
> > properly aligned, then it already is going to get sucky performance
> > because most filesystem serialise sub-block size direct IO because
> > concurrent sub-block IOs to the same block usually leads to data
> > corruption.
> 
> The blocksize of filesysten over loop can be 512, 1024, 2048, and
> suppose sector size of backing device is 4096, then filesystem
> can see aligned direct IO when IO size/offset from application is aligned
> with fs block size, but loop still can't do direct IO for all this
> kind of requests
> against backing file.

Sure, but again you're talking about a fairly rare configuration.
The vast majority of filesystems use 4k block sizes, just like the
vast majority of applications use buffered IO. Don't jump through
hoops to optimise a case that probably doesn't need optimising. Make
it work correctly first, then optimise performance later when
someone has a need for it to be really fast.

> Another case is that application may access loop block directly, such
> as 'dd if=/dev/loopN', but it may not be common, and maybe it needn't
> to consider.

'dd if=/dev/loopN bs=4k....'

Cheers,

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