xfs: rework datasync tracking and execution
Jan Kara reported that the shared ILOCK held across the journal
flush during fdatasync operations slows down O_DSYNC DIO on
unwritten extents significantly. The underlying issue is that
unwritten extent conversion needs the ILOCK exclusive, whilst the
datasync operation after the extent conversion holds it shared.
Hence we cannot be flushing the journal for one IO completion whilst
at the same time doing unwritten extent conversion on another IO
completion on the same inode. This means that IO completions
lock-step, and IO performance is dependent on the journal flush
latency.
Jan demonstrated that reducing the ifdatasync lock hold time can
improve O_DSYNC DIO to unwritten extents performance by 2.5x.
Discussion on that patch found issues with the method, and we
came to the conclusion that separately tracking datasync flush
sequences was the best approach to solving the problem.
The fsync code uses the ILOCK to serialise against concurrent
modifications in the transaction commit phase. In a transaction
commit, there are several disjoint updates to inode log item state
that need to be considered atomically by the fsync code. These
operations are all done under ILOCK_EXCL context:
1. ili_fsync_flags is updated in ->iop_precommit
2. i_pincount is updated in ->iop_pin before it is added to the CIL
3. ili_commit_seq is updated in ->iop_committing, after it has been
added to the CIL
In fsync, we need to:
1. check that the inode is dirty in the journal (ipincount)
2. check that ili_fsync_flags is set
3. grab the ili_commit_seq if a journal flush is needed
4. clear the ili_fsync_flags to ensure that new modifications that
require fsync are tracked in ->iop_precommit correctly
The serialisation of ipincount/ili_commit_seq is needed
to ensure that we don't try to unnecessarily flush the journal.
The serialisation of ili_fsync_flags being set in
->iop_precommit and cleared in fsync post journal flush is
required for correctness.
Hence holding the ILOCK_SHARED in xfs_file_fsync() performs all this
serialisation for us. Ideally, we want to remove the need to hold
the ILOCK_SHARED in xfs_file_fsync() for best performance.
We start with the observation that fsync/fdatasync() only need to
wait for operations that have been completed. Hence operations that
are still being committed have not completed and datasync operations
do not need to wait for them.
This means we can use a single point in time in the commit process
to signal "this modification is complete". This is what
->iop_committing is supposed to provide - it is the point at which
the object is unlocked after the modification has been recorded in
the CIL. Hence we could use ili_commit_seq to determine if we should
flush the journal.
In theory, we can already do this. However, in practice this will
expose an internal global CIL lock to the IO path. The ipincount()
checks optimise away the need to take this lock - if the inode is
not pinned, then it is not in the CIL and we don't need to check if
a journal flush at ili_commit_seq needs to be performed.
The reason this is needed is that the ili_commit_seq is never
cleared. Once it is set, it remains set even once the journal has
been committed and the object has been unpinned. Hence we have to
look that journal internal commit sequence state to determine if
ili_commit_seq needs to be acted on or not.
We can solve this by clearing ili_commit_seq when the inode is
unpinned. If we clear it atomically with the last unpin going away,
then we are guaranteed that new modifications will order correctly
as they add a new pin counts and we won't clear a sequence number
for an active modification in the CIL.
Further, we can then allow the per-transaction flag state to
propagate into ->iop_committing (instead of clearing it in
->iop_precommit) and that will allow us to determine if the
modification needs a full fsync or just a datasync, and so we can
record a separate datasync sequence number (Jan's idea!) and then
use that in the fdatasync path instead of the full fsync sequence
number.
With this infrastructure in place, we no longer need the
ILOCK_SHARED in the fsync path. All serialisation is done against
the commit sequence numbers - if the sequence number is set, then we
have to flush the journal. If it is not set, then we have nothing to
do. This greatly simplifies the fsync implementation....
Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Tested-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Carlos Maiolino <cem@kernel.org>
5 files changed
