<feed xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom'>
<title>linux-toradex.git/mm/readahead.c, branch v3.4.99</title>
<subtitle>Linux kernel for Apalis and Colibri modules</subtitle>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.toradex.cn/cgit/linux-toradex.git/'/>
<entry>
<title>mm: Map most files to use export.h instead of module.h</title>
<updated>2011-10-31T13:20:12+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Paul Gortmaker</name>
<email>paul.gortmaker@windriver.com</email>
</author>
<published>2011-10-16T06:01:52+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.toradex.cn/cgit/linux-toradex.git/commit/?id=b95f1b31b75588306e32b2afd32166cad48f670b'/>
<id>b95f1b31b75588306e32b2afd32166cad48f670b</id>
<content type='text'>
The files changed within are only using the EXPORT_SYMBOL
macro variants.  They are not using core modular infrastructure
and hence don't need module.h but only the export.h header.

Signed-off-by: Paul Gortmaker &lt;paul.gortmaker@windriver.com&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
The files changed within are only using the EXPORT_SYMBOL
macro variants.  They are not using core modular infrastructure
and hence don't need module.h but only the export.h header.

Signed-off-by: Paul Gortmaker &lt;paul.gortmaker@windriver.com&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>readahead: readahead page allocations are OK to fail</title>
<updated>2011-05-25T15:39:25+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Wu Fengguang</name>
<email>fengguang.wu@intel.com</email>
</author>
<published>2011-05-25T00:12:25+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.toradex.cn/cgit/linux-toradex.git/commit/?id=7b1de5868b124d8f399d8791ed30a9b679d64d4d'/>
<id>7b1de5868b124d8f399d8791ed30a9b679d64d4d</id>
<content type='text'>
Pass __GFP_NORETRY|__GFP_NOWARN for readahead page allocations.

readahead page allocations are completely optional.  They are OK to fail
and in particular shall not trigger OOM on themselves.

Reported-by: Dave Young &lt;hidave.darkstar@gmail.com&gt;
Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro &lt;kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang &lt;fengguang.wu@intel.com&gt;
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim &lt;minchan.kim@gmail.com&gt;
Reviewed-by: Pekka Enberg &lt;penberg@kernel.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
Pass __GFP_NORETRY|__GFP_NOWARN for readahead page allocations.

readahead page allocations are completely optional.  They are OK to fail
and in particular shall not trigger OOM on themselves.

Reported-by: Dave Young &lt;hidave.darkstar@gmail.com&gt;
Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro &lt;kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang &lt;fengguang.wu@intel.com&gt;
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim &lt;minchan.kim@gmail.com&gt;
Reviewed-by: Pekka Enberg &lt;penberg@kernel.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>read-ahead: use plugging</title>
<updated>2011-03-10T07:52:26+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Jens Axboe</name>
<email>jaxboe@fusionio.com</email>
</author>
<published>2010-04-19T08:04:38+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.toradex.cn/cgit/linux-toradex.git/commit/?id=5b417b1873694ece3291d7f64a943304559a817b'/>
<id>5b417b1873694ece3291d7f64a943304559a817b</id>
<content type='text'>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe &lt;jaxboe@fusionio.com&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe &lt;jaxboe@fusionio.com&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>block: remove per-queue plugging</title>
<updated>2011-03-10T07:52:07+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Jens Axboe</name>
<email>jaxboe@fusionio.com</email>
</author>
<published>2011-03-10T07:52:07+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.toradex.cn/cgit/linux-toradex.git/commit/?id=7eaceaccab5f40bbfda044629a6298616aeaed50'/>
<id>7eaceaccab5f40bbfda044629a6298616aeaed50</id>
<content type='text'>
Code has been converted over to the new explicit on-stack plugging,
and delay users have been converted to use the new API for that.
So lets kill off the old plugging along with aops-&gt;sync_page().

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe &lt;jaxboe@fusionio.com&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
Code has been converted over to the new explicit on-stack plugging,
and delay users have been converted to use the new API for that.
So lets kill off the old plugging along with aops-&gt;sync_page().

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe &lt;jaxboe@fusionio.com&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>readahead.c: fix comment</title>
<updated>2010-05-25T15:07:00+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Huang Shijie</name>
<email>shijie8@gmail.com</email>
</author>
<published>2010-05-24T21:32:36+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.toradex.cn/cgit/linux-toradex.git/commit/?id=bf8abe8b926f7546eb763fd2a088fe461dde6317'/>
<id>bf8abe8b926f7546eb763fd2a088fe461dde6317</id>
<content type='text'>
Fix a wrong comment over page_cache_async_readahead().

Signed-off-by: Huang Shijie &lt;shijie8@gmail.com&gt;
Acked-by: Wu Fengguang &lt;fengguang.wu@intel.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
Fix a wrong comment over page_cache_async_readahead().

Signed-off-by: Huang Shijie &lt;shijie8@gmail.com&gt;
Acked-by: Wu Fengguang &lt;fengguang.wu@intel.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>readahead: fix NULL filp dereference</title>
<updated>2010-04-07T15:38:03+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Wu Fengguang</name>
<email>fengguang.wu@intel.com</email>
</author>
<published>2010-04-06T21:34:53+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.toradex.cn/cgit/linux-toradex.git/commit/?id=70655c06bd3f25111312d63985888112aed15ac5'/>
<id>70655c06bd3f25111312d63985888112aed15ac5</id>
<content type='text'>
btrfs relocate_file_extent_cluster() calls us with NULL filp:

  [ 4005.426805] BUG: unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at 00000021
  [ 4005.426818] IP: [&lt;c109a130&gt;] page_cache_sync_readahead+0x18/0x3e

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang &lt;fengguang.wu@intel.com&gt;
Cc: Yan Zheng &lt;yanzheng@21cn.com&gt;
Reported-by: Kirill A. Shutemov &lt;kirill@shutemov.name&gt;
Tested-by: Kirill A. Shutemov &lt;kirill@shutemov.name&gt;
Cc: &lt;stable@kernel.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
btrfs relocate_file_extent_cluster() calls us with NULL filp:

  [ 4005.426805] BUG: unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at 00000021
  [ 4005.426818] IP: [&lt;c109a130&gt;] page_cache_sync_readahead+0x18/0x3e

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang &lt;fengguang.wu@intel.com&gt;
Cc: Yan Zheng &lt;yanzheng@21cn.com&gt;
Reported-by: Kirill A. Shutemov &lt;kirill@shutemov.name&gt;
Tested-by: Kirill A. Shutemov &lt;kirill@shutemov.name&gt;
Cc: &lt;stable@kernel.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>include cleanup: Update gfp.h and slab.h includes to prepare for breaking implicit slab.h inclusion from percpu.h</title>
<updated>2010-03-30T13:02:32+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Tejun Heo</name>
<email>tj@kernel.org</email>
</author>
<published>2010-03-24T08:04:11+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.toradex.cn/cgit/linux-toradex.git/commit/?id=5a0e3ad6af8660be21ca98a971cd00f331318c05'/>
<id>5a0e3ad6af8660be21ca98a971cd00f331318c05</id>
<content type='text'>
percpu.h is included by sched.h and module.h and thus ends up being
included when building most .c files.  percpu.h includes slab.h which
in turn includes gfp.h making everything defined by the two files
universally available and complicating inclusion dependencies.

percpu.h -&gt; slab.h dependency is about to be removed.  Prepare for
this change by updating users of gfp and slab facilities include those
headers directly instead of assuming availability.  As this conversion
needs to touch large number of source files, the following script is
used as the basis of conversion.

  http://userweb.kernel.org/~tj/misc/slabh-sweep.py

The script does the followings.

* Scan files for gfp and slab usages and update includes such that
  only the necessary includes are there.  ie. if only gfp is used,
  gfp.h, if slab is used, slab.h.

* When the script inserts a new include, it looks at the include
  blocks and try to put the new include such that its order conforms
  to its surrounding.  It's put in the include block which contains
  core kernel includes, in the same order that the rest are ordered -
  alphabetical, Christmas tree, rev-Xmas-tree or at the end if there
  doesn't seem to be any matching order.

* If the script can't find a place to put a new include (mostly
  because the file doesn't have fitting include block), it prints out
  an error message indicating which .h file needs to be added to the
  file.

The conversion was done in the following steps.

1. The initial automatic conversion of all .c files updated slightly
   over 4000 files, deleting around 700 includes and adding ~480 gfp.h
   and ~3000 slab.h inclusions.  The script emitted errors for ~400
   files.

2. Each error was manually checked.  Some didn't need the inclusion,
   some needed manual addition while adding it to implementation .h or
   embedding .c file was more appropriate for others.  This step added
   inclusions to around 150 files.

3. The script was run again and the output was compared to the edits
   from #2 to make sure no file was left behind.

4. Several build tests were done and a couple of problems were fixed.
   e.g. lib/decompress_*.c used malloc/free() wrappers around slab
   APIs requiring slab.h to be added manually.

5. The script was run on all .h files but without automatically
   editing them as sprinkling gfp.h and slab.h inclusions around .h
   files could easily lead to inclusion dependency hell.  Most gfp.h
   inclusion directives were ignored as stuff from gfp.h was usually
   wildly available and often used in preprocessor macros.  Each
   slab.h inclusion directive was examined and added manually as
   necessary.

6. percpu.h was updated not to include slab.h.

7. Build test were done on the following configurations and failures
   were fixed.  CONFIG_GCOV_KERNEL was turned off for all tests (as my
   distributed build env didn't work with gcov compiles) and a few
   more options had to be turned off depending on archs to make things
   build (like ipr on powerpc/64 which failed due to missing writeq).

   * x86 and x86_64 UP and SMP allmodconfig and a custom test config.
   * powerpc and powerpc64 SMP allmodconfig
   * sparc and sparc64 SMP allmodconfig
   * ia64 SMP allmodconfig
   * s390 SMP allmodconfig
   * alpha SMP allmodconfig
   * um on x86_64 SMP allmodconfig

8. percpu.h modifications were reverted so that it could be applied as
   a separate patch and serve as bisection point.

Given the fact that I had only a couple of failures from tests on step
6, I'm fairly confident about the coverage of this conversion patch.
If there is a breakage, it's likely to be something in one of the arch
headers which should be easily discoverable easily on most builds of
the specific arch.

Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo &lt;tj@kernel.org&gt;
Guess-its-ok-by: Christoph Lameter &lt;cl@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Cc: Ingo Molnar &lt;mingo@redhat.com&gt;
Cc: Lee Schermerhorn &lt;Lee.Schermerhorn@hp.com&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
percpu.h is included by sched.h and module.h and thus ends up being
included when building most .c files.  percpu.h includes slab.h which
in turn includes gfp.h making everything defined by the two files
universally available and complicating inclusion dependencies.

percpu.h -&gt; slab.h dependency is about to be removed.  Prepare for
this change by updating users of gfp and slab facilities include those
headers directly instead of assuming availability.  As this conversion
needs to touch large number of source files, the following script is
used as the basis of conversion.

  http://userweb.kernel.org/~tj/misc/slabh-sweep.py

The script does the followings.

* Scan files for gfp and slab usages and update includes such that
  only the necessary includes are there.  ie. if only gfp is used,
  gfp.h, if slab is used, slab.h.

* When the script inserts a new include, it looks at the include
  blocks and try to put the new include such that its order conforms
  to its surrounding.  It's put in the include block which contains
  core kernel includes, in the same order that the rest are ordered -
  alphabetical, Christmas tree, rev-Xmas-tree or at the end if there
  doesn't seem to be any matching order.

* If the script can't find a place to put a new include (mostly
  because the file doesn't have fitting include block), it prints out
  an error message indicating which .h file needs to be added to the
  file.

The conversion was done in the following steps.

1. The initial automatic conversion of all .c files updated slightly
   over 4000 files, deleting around 700 includes and adding ~480 gfp.h
   and ~3000 slab.h inclusions.  The script emitted errors for ~400
   files.

2. Each error was manually checked.  Some didn't need the inclusion,
   some needed manual addition while adding it to implementation .h or
   embedding .c file was more appropriate for others.  This step added
   inclusions to around 150 files.

3. The script was run again and the output was compared to the edits
   from #2 to make sure no file was left behind.

4. Several build tests were done and a couple of problems were fixed.
   e.g. lib/decompress_*.c used malloc/free() wrappers around slab
   APIs requiring slab.h to be added manually.

5. The script was run on all .h files but without automatically
   editing them as sprinkling gfp.h and slab.h inclusions around .h
   files could easily lead to inclusion dependency hell.  Most gfp.h
   inclusion directives were ignored as stuff from gfp.h was usually
   wildly available and often used in preprocessor macros.  Each
   slab.h inclusion directive was examined and added manually as
   necessary.

6. percpu.h was updated not to include slab.h.

7. Build test were done on the following configurations and failures
   were fixed.  CONFIG_GCOV_KERNEL was turned off for all tests (as my
   distributed build env didn't work with gcov compiles) and a few
   more options had to be turned off depending on archs to make things
   build (like ipr on powerpc/64 which failed due to missing writeq).

   * x86 and x86_64 UP and SMP allmodconfig and a custom test config.
   * powerpc and powerpc64 SMP allmodconfig
   * sparc and sparc64 SMP allmodconfig
   * ia64 SMP allmodconfig
   * s390 SMP allmodconfig
   * alpha SMP allmodconfig
   * um on x86_64 SMP allmodconfig

8. percpu.h modifications were reverted so that it could be applied as
   a separate patch and serve as bisection point.

Given the fact that I had only a couple of failures from tests on step
6, I'm fairly confident about the coverage of this conversion patch.
If there is a breakage, it's likely to be something in one of the arch
headers which should be easily discoverable easily on most builds of
the specific arch.

Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo &lt;tj@kernel.org&gt;
Guess-its-ok-by: Christoph Lameter &lt;cl@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Cc: Ingo Molnar &lt;mingo@redhat.com&gt;
Cc: Lee Schermerhorn &lt;Lee.Schermerhorn@hp.com&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>readahead: introduce FMODE_RANDOM for POSIX_FADV_RANDOM</title>
<updated>2010-03-06T19:26:25+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Wu Fengguang</name>
<email>fengguang.wu@intel.com</email>
</author>
<published>2010-03-05T21:42:03+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.toradex.cn/cgit/linux-toradex.git/commit/?id=0141450f66c3c12a3aaa869748caa64241885cdf'/>
<id>0141450f66c3c12a3aaa869748caa64241885cdf</id>
<content type='text'>
This fixes inefficient page-by-page reads on POSIX_FADV_RANDOM.

POSIX_FADV_RANDOM used to set ra_pages=0, which leads to poor performance:
a 16K read will be carried out in 4 _sync_ 1-page reads.

In other places, ra_pages==0 means
- it's ramfs/tmpfs/hugetlbfs/sysfs/configfs
- some IO error happened
where multi-page read IO won't help or should be avoided.

POSIX_FADV_RANDOM actually want a different semantics: to disable the
*heuristic* readahead algorithm, and to use a dumb one which faithfully
submit read IO for whatever application requests.

So introduce a flag FMODE_RANDOM for POSIX_FADV_RANDOM.

Note that the random hint is not likely to help random reads performance
noticeably.  And it may be too permissive on huge request size (its IO
size is not limited by read_ahead_kb).

In Quentin's report (http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/12/24/145), the overall
(NFS read) performance of the application increased by 313%!

Tested-by: Quentin Barnes &lt;qbarnes+nfs@yahoo-inc.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang &lt;fengguang.wu@intel.com&gt;
Cc: Nick Piggin &lt;npiggin@suse.de&gt;
Cc: Andi Kleen &lt;andi@firstfloor.org&gt;
Cc: Steven Whitehouse &lt;swhiteho@redhat.com&gt;
Cc: David Howells &lt;dhowells@redhat.com&gt;
Cc: Jonathan Corbet &lt;corbet@lwn.net&gt;
Cc: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
Cc: Christoph Hellwig &lt;hch@infradead.org&gt;
Cc: Trond Myklebust &lt;Trond.Myklebust@netapp.com&gt;
Cc: Chuck Lever &lt;chuck.lever@oracle.com&gt;
Cc: &lt;stable@kernel.org&gt;			[2.6.33.x]
Cc: &lt;qbarnes+nfs@yahoo-inc.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
This fixes inefficient page-by-page reads on POSIX_FADV_RANDOM.

POSIX_FADV_RANDOM used to set ra_pages=0, which leads to poor performance:
a 16K read will be carried out in 4 _sync_ 1-page reads.

In other places, ra_pages==0 means
- it's ramfs/tmpfs/hugetlbfs/sysfs/configfs
- some IO error happened
where multi-page read IO won't help or should be avoided.

POSIX_FADV_RANDOM actually want a different semantics: to disable the
*heuristic* readahead algorithm, and to use a dumb one which faithfully
submit read IO for whatever application requests.

So introduce a flag FMODE_RANDOM for POSIX_FADV_RANDOM.

Note that the random hint is not likely to help random reads performance
noticeably.  And it may be too permissive on huge request size (its IO
size is not limited by read_ahead_kb).

In Quentin's report (http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/12/24/145), the overall
(NFS read) performance of the application increased by 313%!

Tested-by: Quentin Barnes &lt;qbarnes+nfs@yahoo-inc.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang &lt;fengguang.wu@intel.com&gt;
Cc: Nick Piggin &lt;npiggin@suse.de&gt;
Cc: Andi Kleen &lt;andi@firstfloor.org&gt;
Cc: Steven Whitehouse &lt;swhiteho@redhat.com&gt;
Cc: David Howells &lt;dhowells@redhat.com&gt;
Cc: Jonathan Corbet &lt;corbet@lwn.net&gt;
Cc: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
Cc: Christoph Hellwig &lt;hch@infradead.org&gt;
Cc: Trond Myklebust &lt;Trond.Myklebust@netapp.com&gt;
Cc: Chuck Lever &lt;chuck.lever@oracle.com&gt;
Cc: &lt;stable@kernel.org&gt;			[2.6.33.x]
Cc: &lt;qbarnes+nfs@yahoo-inc.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>readahead: add blk_run_backing_dev</title>
<updated>2009-12-17T23:45:32+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Hisashi Hifumi</name>
<email>hifumi.hisashi@oss.ntt.co.jp</email>
</author>
<published>2009-12-17T23:27:26+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.toradex.cn/cgit/linux-toradex.git/commit/?id=65a80b4c61f5b5f6eb0f5669c8fb120893bfb388'/>
<id>65a80b4c61f5b5f6eb0f5669c8fb120893bfb388</id>
<content type='text'>
I added blk_run_backing_dev on page_cache_async_readahead so readahead I/O
is unpluged to improve throughput on especially RAID environment.

The normal case is, if page N become uptodate at time T(N), then T(N) &lt;=
T(N+1) holds.  With RAID (and NFS to some degree), there is no strict
ordering, the data arrival time depends on runtime status of individual
disks, which breaks that formula.  So in do_generic_file_read(), just
after submitting the async readahead IO request, the current page may well
be uptodate, so the page won't be locked, and the block device won't be
implicitly unplugged:

               if (PageReadahead(page))
                        page_cache_async_readahead()
                if (!PageUptodate(page))
                                goto page_not_up_to_date;
                //...
page_not_up_to_date:
                lock_page_killable(page);

Therefore explicit unplugging can help.

Following is the test result with dd.

#dd if=testdir/testfile of=/dev/null bs=16384

-2.6.30-rc6
1048576+0 records in
1048576+0 records out
17179869184 bytes (17 GB) copied, 224.182 seconds, 76.6 MB/s

-2.6.30-rc6-patched
1048576+0 records in
1048576+0 records out
17179869184 bytes (17 GB) copied, 206.465 seconds, 83.2 MB/s

(7Disks RAID-0 Array)

-2.6.30-rc6
1054976+0 records in
1054976+0 records out
17284726784 bytes (17 GB) copied, 212.233 seconds, 81.4 MB/s

-2.6.30-rc6-patched
1054976+0 records out
17284726784 bytes (17 GB) copied, 198.878 seconds, 86.9 MB/s

(7Disks RAID-5 Array)

The patch was found to improve performance with the SCST scsi target
driver.  See
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=a0272b440906030714g67eabc5k8f847fb1e538cc62%40mail.gmail.com&amp;forum_name=scst-devel

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: unbust comment layout]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: "fix" CONFIG_BLOCK=n]
Signed-off-by: Hisashi Hifumi &lt;hifumi.hisashi@oss.ntt.co.jp&gt;
Acked-by: Wu Fengguang &lt;fengguang.wu@intel.com&gt;
Cc: Jens Axboe &lt;jens.axboe@oracle.com&gt;
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro &lt;kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com&gt;
Tested-by: Ronald &lt;intercommit@gmail.com&gt;
Cc: Bart Van Assche &lt;bart.vanassche@gmail.com&gt;
Cc: Vladislav Bolkhovitin &lt;vst@vlnb.net&gt;
Cc: Randy Dunlap &lt;randy.dunlap@oracle.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
I added blk_run_backing_dev on page_cache_async_readahead so readahead I/O
is unpluged to improve throughput on especially RAID environment.

The normal case is, if page N become uptodate at time T(N), then T(N) &lt;=
T(N+1) holds.  With RAID (and NFS to some degree), there is no strict
ordering, the data arrival time depends on runtime status of individual
disks, which breaks that formula.  So in do_generic_file_read(), just
after submitting the async readahead IO request, the current page may well
be uptodate, so the page won't be locked, and the block device won't be
implicitly unplugged:

               if (PageReadahead(page))
                        page_cache_async_readahead()
                if (!PageUptodate(page))
                                goto page_not_up_to_date;
                //...
page_not_up_to_date:
                lock_page_killable(page);

Therefore explicit unplugging can help.

Following is the test result with dd.

#dd if=testdir/testfile of=/dev/null bs=16384

-2.6.30-rc6
1048576+0 records in
1048576+0 records out
17179869184 bytes (17 GB) copied, 224.182 seconds, 76.6 MB/s

-2.6.30-rc6-patched
1048576+0 records in
1048576+0 records out
17179869184 bytes (17 GB) copied, 206.465 seconds, 83.2 MB/s

(7Disks RAID-0 Array)

-2.6.30-rc6
1054976+0 records in
1054976+0 records out
17284726784 bytes (17 GB) copied, 212.233 seconds, 81.4 MB/s

-2.6.30-rc6-patched
1054976+0 records out
17284726784 bytes (17 GB) copied, 198.878 seconds, 86.9 MB/s

(7Disks RAID-5 Array)

The patch was found to improve performance with the SCST scsi target
driver.  See
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=a0272b440906030714g67eabc5k8f847fb1e538cc62%40mail.gmail.com&amp;forum_name=scst-devel

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: unbust comment layout]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: "fix" CONFIG_BLOCK=n]
Signed-off-by: Hisashi Hifumi &lt;hifumi.hisashi@oss.ntt.co.jp&gt;
Acked-by: Wu Fengguang &lt;fengguang.wu@intel.com&gt;
Cc: Jens Axboe &lt;jens.axboe@oracle.com&gt;
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro &lt;kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com&gt;
Tested-by: Ronald &lt;intercommit@gmail.com&gt;
Cc: Bart Van Assche &lt;bart.vanassche@gmail.com&gt;
Cc: Vladislav Bolkhovitin &lt;vst@vlnb.net&gt;
Cc: Randy Dunlap &lt;randy.dunlap@oracle.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>readahead: introduce context readahead algorithm</title>
<updated>2009-06-17T02:47:30+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Wu Fengguang</name>
<email>fengguang.wu@intel.com</email>
</author>
<published>2009-06-16T22:31:36+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.toradex.cn/cgit/linux-toradex.git/commit/?id=10be0b372cac50e2e7a477852f98bf069a97a3fa'/>
<id>10be0b372cac50e2e7a477852f98bf069a97a3fa</id>
<content type='text'>
Introduce page cache context based readahead algorithm.
This is to better support concurrent read streams in general.

RATIONALE
---------
The current readahead algorithm detects interleaved reads in a _passive_ way.
Given a sequence of interleaved streams 1,1001,2,1002,3,4,1003,5,1004,1005,6,...
By checking for (offset == prev_offset + 1), it will discover the sequentialness
between 3,4 and between 1004,1005, and start doing sequential readahead for the
individual streams since page 4 and page 1005.

The context readahead algorithm guarantees to discover the sequentialness no
matter how the streams are interleaved. For the above example, it will start
sequential readahead since page 2 and 1002.

The trick is to poke for page @offset-1 in the page cache when it has no other
clues on the sequentialness of request @offset: if the current requenst belongs
to a sequential stream, that stream must have accessed page @offset-1 recently,
and the page will still be cached now. So if page @offset-1 is there, we can
take request @offset as a sequential access.

BENEFICIARIES
-------------
- strictly interleaved reads  i.e. 1,1001,2,1002,3,1003,...
  the current readahead will take them as silly random reads;
  the context readahead will take them as two sequential streams.

- cooperative IO processes   i.e. NFS and SCST
  They create a thread pool, farming off (sequential) IO requests to different
  threads which will be performing interleaved IO.

  It was not easy(or possible) to reliably tell from file-&gt;f_ra all those
  cooperative processes working on the same sequential stream, since they will
  have different file-&gt;f_ra instances. And NFSD's file-&gt;f_ra is particularly
  unusable, since their file objects are dynamically created for each request.
  The nfsd does have code trying to restore the f_ra bits, but not satisfactory.

  The new scheme is to detect the sequential pattern via looking up the page
  cache, which provides one single and consistent view of the pages recently
  accessed. That makes sequential detection for cooperative processes possible.

USER REPORT
-----------
Vladislav recommends the addition of context readahead as a result of his SCST
benchmarks. It leads to 6%~40% performance gains in various cases and achieves
equal performance in others.                http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/3/19/239

OVERHEADS
---------
In theory, it introduces one extra page cache lookup per random read.  However
the below benchmark shows context readahead to be slightly faster, wondering..

Randomly reading 200MB amount of data on a sparse file, repeat 20 times for
each block size. The average throughputs are:

                       	original ra	context ra	gain
 4K random reads:	 65.561MB/s	 65.648MB/s	+0.1%
16K random reads:	124.767MB/s	124.951MB/s	+0.1%
64K random reads: 	162.123MB/s	162.278MB/s	+0.1%

Cc: Jens Axboe &lt;jens.axboe@oracle.com&gt;
Cc: Jeff Moyer &lt;jmoyer@redhat.com&gt;
Tested-by: Vladislav Bolkhovitin &lt;vst@vlnb.net&gt;
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang &lt;fengguang.wu@intel.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
Introduce page cache context based readahead algorithm.
This is to better support concurrent read streams in general.

RATIONALE
---------
The current readahead algorithm detects interleaved reads in a _passive_ way.
Given a sequence of interleaved streams 1,1001,2,1002,3,4,1003,5,1004,1005,6,...
By checking for (offset == prev_offset + 1), it will discover the sequentialness
between 3,4 and between 1004,1005, and start doing sequential readahead for the
individual streams since page 4 and page 1005.

The context readahead algorithm guarantees to discover the sequentialness no
matter how the streams are interleaved. For the above example, it will start
sequential readahead since page 2 and 1002.

The trick is to poke for page @offset-1 in the page cache when it has no other
clues on the sequentialness of request @offset: if the current requenst belongs
to a sequential stream, that stream must have accessed page @offset-1 recently,
and the page will still be cached now. So if page @offset-1 is there, we can
take request @offset as a sequential access.

BENEFICIARIES
-------------
- strictly interleaved reads  i.e. 1,1001,2,1002,3,1003,...
  the current readahead will take them as silly random reads;
  the context readahead will take them as two sequential streams.

- cooperative IO processes   i.e. NFS and SCST
  They create a thread pool, farming off (sequential) IO requests to different
  threads which will be performing interleaved IO.

  It was not easy(or possible) to reliably tell from file-&gt;f_ra all those
  cooperative processes working on the same sequential stream, since they will
  have different file-&gt;f_ra instances. And NFSD's file-&gt;f_ra is particularly
  unusable, since their file objects are dynamically created for each request.
  The nfsd does have code trying to restore the f_ra bits, but not satisfactory.

  The new scheme is to detect the sequential pattern via looking up the page
  cache, which provides one single and consistent view of the pages recently
  accessed. That makes sequential detection for cooperative processes possible.

USER REPORT
-----------
Vladislav recommends the addition of context readahead as a result of his SCST
benchmarks. It leads to 6%~40% performance gains in various cases and achieves
equal performance in others.                http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/3/19/239

OVERHEADS
---------
In theory, it introduces one extra page cache lookup per random read.  However
the below benchmark shows context readahead to be slightly faster, wondering..

Randomly reading 200MB amount of data on a sparse file, repeat 20 times for
each block size. The average throughputs are:

                       	original ra	context ra	gain
 4K random reads:	 65.561MB/s	 65.648MB/s	+0.1%
16K random reads:	124.767MB/s	124.951MB/s	+0.1%
64K random reads: 	162.123MB/s	162.278MB/s	+0.1%

Cc: Jens Axboe &lt;jens.axboe@oracle.com&gt;
Cc: Jeff Moyer &lt;jmoyer@redhat.com&gt;
Tested-by: Vladislav Bolkhovitin &lt;vst@vlnb.net&gt;
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang &lt;fengguang.wu@intel.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
</feed>
