On Mon, 28 Apr 2014 15:28:21 +0800 Shaohua Li <shli@kernel.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 05:06:28PM +1000, NeilBrown wrote:
> > On Mon, 28 Apr 2014 14:58:41 +0800 Shaohua Li <shli@kernel.org> wrote:
> > 
> > > 
> > > The stripe cache has two goals:
> > > 1. cache data, so next time if data can be found in stripe cache, disk access
> > > can be avoided.
> > > 2. stable data. data is copied from bio to stripe cache and calculated parity.
> > > data written to disk is from stripe cache, so if upper layer changes bio data,
> > > data written to disk isn't impacted.
> > > 
> > > In my environment, I can guarantee 2 will not happen. For 1, it's not common
> > > too. block plug mechanism will dispatch a bunch of sequentail small requests
> > > together. And since I'm using SSD, I'm using small chunk size. It's rare case
> > > stripe cache is really useful.
> > > 
> > > So I'd like to avoid the copy from bio to stripe cache and it's very helpful
> > > for performance. In my 1M randwrite tests, avoid the copy can increase the
> > > performance more than 30%.
> > > 
> > > Of course, this shouldn't be enabled by default, so I added an option to
> > > control it.
> > 
> > I'm happy to avoid copying when we know that we can.
> > 
> > I'm not really happy about using a sysfs attribute to control it.
> > 
> > How do you guarantee that '2' won't happen?
> > 
> > BTW I don't see '1' as important.  The stripe cache is really for gathering
> > writes together to increase the chance of full-stripe writes, and for
> > handling synchronisation between IO and resync/reshape/etc. The copying is
> > primarily for stability.
> 
> We are using raid5 in a SCSI target appliance. BIO is dispatched from a SCSI
> target layer (like LIO) and no filesytem is involved, so I can guarantee the
> BIO data is stable.
> 
> What's your favorite way to control it?

I would like a bio flag with the meaning "this data is stable until bi_end_io
is called".

I had hoped something like that would come of out the stable-pages effort,
but that focussed on meeting the needs for filesystems more than that needs
of devices.
Maybe we just need to make one ourselves.

NeilBrown