Commit 9faac62d authored Sep 18, 2020 by Ritesh Harjani Committed by Theodore Ts'o Oct 18, 2020

ext4: optimize file overwrites



In case if the file already has underlying blocks/extents allocated
then we don't need to start a journal txn and can directly return
the underlying mapping. Currently ext4_iomap_begin() is used by
both DAX & DIO path. We can check if the write request is an
overwrite & then directly return the mapping information.

This could give a significant perf boost for multi-threaded writes
specially random overwrites.
On PPC64 VM with simulated pmem(DAX) device, ~10x perf improvement
could be seen in random writes (overwrite). Also bcoz this optimizes
away the spinlock contention during jbd2 slab cache allocation
(jbd2_journal_handle). On x86 VM, ~2x perf improvement was observed.

Reported-by: Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Ritesh Harjani <riteshh@linux.ibm.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/88e795d8a4d5cd22165c7ebe857ba91d68d8813e.1600401668.git.riteshh@linux.ibm.com


Signed-off-by: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>

parent 7eb90a2d

fs/ext4/inode.c

+15 −3

Original line number	Diff line number	Diff line
		@@ -3436,14 +3436,26 @@ static int ext4_iomap_begin(struct inode *inode, loff_t offset, loff_t length,
		map.m_len = min_t(loff_t, (offset + length - 1) >> blkbits,
		EXT4_MAX_LOGICAL_BLOCK) - map.m_lblk + 1;

		if (flags & IOMAP_WRITE)
		if (flags & IOMAP_WRITE) {
		/*
		* We check here if the blocks are already allocated, then we
		* don't need to start a journal txn and we can directly return
		* the mapping information. This could boost performance
		* especially in multi-threaded overwrite requests.
		*/
		if (offset + length <= i_size_read(inode)) {
		ret = ext4_map_blocks(NULL, inode, &map, 0);
		if (ret > 0 && (map.m_flags & EXT4_MAP_MAPPED))
		goto out;
		}
		ret = ext4_iomap_alloc(inode, &map, flags);
		else
		} else {
		ret = ext4_map_blocks(NULL, inode, &map, 0);
		}

		if (ret < 0)
		return ret;

		out:
		ext4_set_iomap(inode, iomap, &map, offset, length);

		return 0;

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