Re: [PATCH 2/2] block: loop: avoiding too many pending per work I/O

[Josh Boyer <jwboyer@fedoraproject.org>]

On Tue, May 5, 2015 at 7:49 AM, Ming Lei <ming.lei@canonical.com> wrote:
> If there are too many pending per work I/O, too many
> high priority work thread can be generated so that
> system performance can be effected.
>
> This patch limits the max_active parameter of workqueue as 16.
>
> This patch fixes Fedora 22 live booting performance
> regression when it is booted from squashfs over dm
> based on loop, and looks the following reasons are
> related with the problem:
>
> - not like other filesyststems(such as ext4), squashfs
> is a bit special, and I observed that increasing I/O jobs
> to access file in squashfs only improve I/O performance a
> little, but it can make big difference for ext4
>
> - nested loop: both squashfs.img and ext3fs.img are mounted
> as loop block, and ext3fs.img is inside the squashfs
>
> - during booting, lots of tasks may run concurrently
>
> Fixes: b5dd2f6047ca108001328aac0e8588edd15f1778
> Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org (v4.0)
> Cc: Justin M. Forbes <jforbes@fedoraproject.org>
> Signed-off-by: Ming Lei <ming.lei@canonical.com>

Did we ever come to conclusion on this and patch 1/2 in the series?
Fedora has them applied to it's 4.0.y based kernels to fix the
performance regression we saw, and we're carrying them in rawhide as
well.  I'm curious if these will go into 4.1 or if they're queued at
all for 4.2?

josh

> ---
>  drivers/block/loop.c | 2 +-
>  1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
>
> diff --git a/drivers/block/loop.c b/drivers/block/loop.c
> index 3dc1598..1bee523 100644
> --- a/drivers/block/loop.c
> +++ b/drivers/block/loop.c
> @@ -725,7 +725,7 @@ static int loop_set_fd(struct loop_device *lo, fmode_t mode,
>                 goto out_putf;
>         error = -ENOMEM;
>         lo->wq = alloc_workqueue("kloopd%d",
> -                       WQ_MEM_RECLAIM | WQ_HIGHPRI | WQ_UNBOUND, 0,
> +                       WQ_MEM_RECLAIM | WQ_HIGHPRI | WQ_UNBOUND, 16,
>                         lo->lo_number);
>         if (!lo->wq)
>                 goto out_putf;
> --
> 1.9.1
>
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