[PATCHSET 0/3] Improve IOCB_NOWAIT O_DIRECT

[Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>]

Hi,

Ran into an issue with IOCB_NOWAIT and O_DIRECT, which causes a rather
serious performance issue. If IOCB_NOWAIT is set, the generic/iomap
iterators check for page cache presence in the given range, and return
-EAGAIN if any is there. This is rather simplistic and looks like
something that was never really finished. For !IOCB_NOWAIT, we simply
call filemap_write_and_wait_range() to issue (if any) and wait on the
range. The fact that we have page cache entries for this range does
not mean that we cannot safely do O_DIRECT IO to/from it.

This series adds filemap_range_needs_writeback(), which checks if
we have pages in the range that do require us to call
filemap_write_and_wait_range(). If we don't, then we can proceed just
fine with IOCB_NOWAIT.

The problem manifested itself in a production environment, where someone
is doing O_DIRECT on a raw block device. Due to other circumstances,
blkid was triggered on this device periodically, and blkid very helpfully
does a number of page cache reads on the device. Now the mapping has
page cache entries, and performance falls to pieces because we can no
longer reliably do IOCB_NOWAIT O_DIRECT.

Patch 1 adds the helper, patch 2 uses it for the generic iterators, and
patch 3 applies the same to the iomap direct-io code.

 fs/iomap/direct-io.c | 10 ++++-----
 include/linux/fs.h   |  2 ++
 mm/filemap.c         | 52 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---
 3 files changed, 56 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-)

-- 
Jens Axboe