From: Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
To: linux-block@vger.kernel.org
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Support for I/O to a bitbucket
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2020 18:22:31 +0100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20200818172231.GU17456@casper.infradead.org> (raw)
One of the annoying things in the iomap code is how we handle
block-misaligned I/Os. Consider a write to a file on a 4KiB block size
filesystem (on a 4KiB page size kernel) which starts at byte offset 5000
and is 4133 bytes long.
Today, we allocate page 1 and read bytes 4096-8191 of the file into
it, synchronously. Then we allocate page 2 and read bytes 8192-12287
into it, again, synchronously. Then we copy the user's data into the
pagecache and mark it dirty. This is a fairly significant delay for
the user who normally sees the latency of a memcpy() now has to wait
for two non-overlapping reads to complete.
What I'd love to be able to do is allocate pages 1 & 2, copy the user
data into it and submit one read which targets:
0-903: page 1, offset 0, length 904
904-5036: bitbucket, length 4133
5037-8191: page 2, offset 942, length 3155
That way, we don't even need to wait for the read to complete.
I envisage block allocating a bitbucket page to support devices which
don't have native support for bitbucket descriptors. We'd also need a
fallback path for devices which don't support whatever alignment the
I/O is happening at ... but the block layer already has support for
bounce-buffering, right?
Anyway, I don't have time to take on this work, but I thought I'd throw
it out in case anyone's looking for a project. Or if it's a stupid idea,
someone can point out why.
next reply other threads:[~2020-08-18 17:22 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 2+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-08-18 17:22 Matthew Wilcox [this message]
2020-09-07 0:56 ` Support for I/O to a bitbucket Dave Chinner
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