Re: NVFS XFS metadata (was: [PATCH] pmem: export the symbols __copy_user_flushcache and __copy_from_user_flushcache)

[Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>]

On Wed, 23 Sep 2020, Dave Chinner wrote:

> > > dir-test /mnt/test/linux-2.6 63000 1048576
> > > nvfs		6.6s
> > > ext4 dax	8.4s
> > > xfs dax		12.2s
> > > 
> > > 
> > > dir-test /mnt/test/linux-2.6 63000 1048576 link
> > > nvfs		4.7s
> > > ext4 dax	5.6s
> > > xfs dax		7.8s
> > > 
> > > dir-test /mnt/test/linux-2.6 63000 1048576 dir
> > > nvfs		8.2s
> > > ext4 dax	15.1s
> > > xfs dax		11.8s
> > > 
> > > Yes, nvfs is faster than both ext4 and XFS on DAX, but it's  not a
> > > huge difference - it's not orders of magnitude faster.
> > 
> > If I increase the size of the test directory, NVFS is order of magnitude 
> > faster:
> > 
> > time dir-test /mnt/test/ 2000000 2000000
> > NVFS: 0m29,395s
> > XFS:  1m59,523s
> > EXT4: 1m14,176s
> 
> What happened to NVFS there? The runtime went up by a factor of 5,
> even though the number of ops performed only doubled.

This test is from a different machine (K10 Opteron) than the above test 
(Skylake Xeon). I borrowed the Xeon for a short time and I no longer have 
access to it.

> > time dir-test /mnt/test/ 8000000 8000000
> > NVFS: 2m13,507s
> > XFS: 14m31,261s
> > EXT4: reports "file 1976882 can't be created: No space left on device", 
> > 	(although there are free blocks and inodes)
> > 	Is it a bug or expected behavior?
> 
> Exponential increase in runtime for a workload like this indicates
> the XFS journal is too small to run large scale operations. I'm
> guessing you're just testing on a small device?

In this test, the pmem device had 64GiB.

I've created 1TiB ramdisk, formatted it with XFS and ran dir-test 8000000 
on it, however it wasn't much better - it took 14m8,824s.

> In which case, you'd get a 16MB log for XFS, which is tiny and most
> definitely will limit performance of any large scale metadta
> operation. Performance should improve significantly for large scale
> operations with a much larger log, and that should bring the XFS
> runtimes down significantly.

Is there some mkfs.xfs option that can increase log size?

> > If you think that the lack of journaling is show-stopper, I can implement 
> > it.
> 
> I did not say that. My comments are about the requirement for
> atomicity of object changes, not journalling. Journalling is an
> -implementation that can provide change atomicity-, it is not a
> design constraint for metadata modification algorithms.
> 
> Really, you can chose how to do object update however you want. What
> I want to review is the design documentation and a correctness proof
> for whatever mechanism you choose to use. Without that information,
> we have absolutely no chance of reviewing the filesystem
> implementation for correctness. We don't need a proof for something
> that uses journalling (because we all know how that works), but for
> something that uses soft updates we most definitely need the proof
> of correctness for the update algorithm before we can determine if
> the implementation is good...
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Dave.
> -- 
> Dave Chinner
> david@fromorbit.com

I am thinking about this: I can implement lightweight journaling that will 
journal just a few writes - I'll allocate some small per-cpu intent log 
for that.

For example, in nvfs_rename, we call nvfs_delete_de and nvfs_finish_add - 
these functions are very simple, both of them write just one word - so we 
can add these two words to the intent log. The same for setattr requesting 
simultaneous uid/gid/mode change - they are small, so they'll fit into the 
intent log well.

Regarding verifiability, I can do this - the writes to pmem are wrapped in 
a macro nv_store. So, I can modify this macro so that it logs all 
modifications. Then I take the log, cut it at random time, reorder the 
entries (to simulate reordering in the CPU write-combining buffers), 
replay it, run nvfsck on it and mount it. This way, we can verify that no 
matter where the crash happened, either an old file or a new file is 
present in a directory.

Do you agree with that?

Mikulas