From: Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
To: Jeff Layton <jlayton@kernel.org>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>,
linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org,
Zhengyuan Liu <liuzhengyuang521@gmail.com>,
yukuai3@huawei.com, Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>,
David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>,
linux-xfs@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Dirty bits and sync writes
Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2021 20:42:51 +0100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <YRQoOw2s/Omkq+NN@casper.infradead.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <68817121af70e4c370c541b6d5cc48fe0f11e312.camel@kernel.org>
On Wed, Aug 11, 2021 at 03:04:07PM -0400, Jeff Layton wrote:
> On Mon, 2021-08-09 at 16:30 +0100, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > On Mon, Aug 09, 2021 at 03:48:56PM +0100, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > > On Tue, Aug 03, 2021 at 04:28:14PM +0100, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > > > Solution 1: Add an array of dirty bits to the iomap_page
> > > > data structure. This patch already exists; would need
> > > > to be adjusted slightly to apply to the current tree.
> > > > https://lore.kernel.org/linux-xfs/7fb4bb5a-adc7-5914-3aae-179dd8f3adb1@huawei.com/
> > >
> > > > Solution 2a: Replace the array of uptodate bits with an array of
> > > > dirty bits. It is not often useful to know which parts of the page are
> > > > uptodate; usually the entire page is uptodate. We can actually use the
> > > > dirty bits for the same purpose as uptodate bits; if a block is dirty, it
> > > > is definitely uptodate. If a block is !dirty, and the page is !uptodate,
> > > > the block may or may not be uptodate, but it can be safely re-read from
> > > > storage without losing any data.
> > >
> > > 1 or 2a seems like something we should do once we have lage folio
> > > support.
> > >
> > >
> > > > Solution 2b: Lose the concept of partially uptodate pages. If we're
> > > > going to write to a partial page, just bring the entire page uptodate
> > > > first, then write to it. It's not clear to me that partially-uptodate
> > > > pages are really useful. I don't know of any network filesystems that
> > > > support partially-uptodate pages, for example. It seems to have been
> > > > something we did for buffer_head based filesystems "because we could"
> > > > rather than finding a workload that actually cares.
> > >
>
> I may be wrong, but I thought NFS actually could deal with partially
> uptodate pages. In some cases it can opt to just do a write to a page
> w/o reading first and flush just that section when the time comes.
>
> I think the heuristics are in nfs_want_read_modify_write(). #3 may be a
> better way though.
Yes; I was talking specifically about iomap here. I like what NFS does;
it makes a lot of sense to me. The only thing I'd like to change for
NFS is to add an ->is_partially_uptodate implementation. But that
only matters if somebody calls read() on some bytes they just wrote.
And I don't know that that's a particularly common or interesting
thing to do. I suppose if there are two processes with one writing
to the file and the other reading from it, we might get that.
> > > The uptodate bit is important for the use case of a smaller than page
> > > size buffered write into a page that hasn't been read in already, which
> > > is fairly common for things like log writes. So I'd hate to lose this
> > > optimization.
> > >
> > > > (it occurs to me that solution 3 actually allows us to do IOs at storage
> > > > block size instead of filesystem block size, potentially reducing write
> > > > amplification even more, although we will need to be a bit careful if
> > > > we're doing a CoW.)
> > >
> > > number 3 might be nice optimization. The even better version would
> > > be a disk format change to just log those updates in the log and
> > > otherwise use the normal dirty mechanism. I once had a crude prototype
> > > for that.
> >
> > That's a bit beyond my scope at this point. I'm currently working on
> > write-through. Once I have that working, I think the next step is:
> >
> > - Replace the ->uptodate array with a ->dirty array
> > - If the entire page is Uptodate, drop the iomap_page. That means that
> > writebacks will write back the entire folio, not just the dirty
> > pieces.
> > - If doing a partial page write
> > - If the write is block-aligned (offset & length), leave the page
> > !Uptodate and mark the dirty blocks
> > - Otherwise bring the entire page Uptodate first, then mark it dirty
> >
> > To take an example of a 512-byte block size file accepting a 520 byte
> > write at offset 500, we currently submit two reads, one for bytes 0-511
> > and the second for 1024-1535. We're better off submitting a read for
> > bytes 0-4095 and then overwriting the entire thing.
> >
> > But it's still better to do no reads at all if someone submits a write
> > for bytes 512-1023, or 512-N where N is past EOF. And I'd preserve
> > that behaviour.
>
> I like this idea too.
>
> I'd also point out that both cifs and ceph (at least) can read and write
> "around" the cache in some cases (using non-pagecache pages) when they
> can't get the proper oplock/lease/caps from the server. Both of them
> have completely separate "uncached" codepaths, that are distinct from
> the O_DIRECT cases.
>
> This scheme could potentially be a saner method of dealing with those
> situations too.
Possibly ... how do cifs & ceph handle writable mmap() when they can't
get the proper exclusive access from the server?
The major downside I can see is that if you have multiple writes to
the same page then the writes will be serialised. But maybe they
already are by the scheme used by cifs & ceph?
(That could be worked around by tracking outstanding writes to the
server and only clearing the writeback bit once all writes have
completed)
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2021-08-11 19:44 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 6+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2021-08-03 15:28 Dirty bits and sync writes Matthew Wilcox
2021-08-09 14:48 ` Christoph Hellwig
2021-08-09 15:30 ` Matthew Wilcox
2021-08-11 19:04 ` Jeff Layton
2021-08-11 19:42 ` Matthew Wilcox [this message]
2021-08-11 20:40 ` Jeff Layton
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