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    SubjectRe: [PATCH] Improve buffered streaming write ordering
    On Thu, Oct 02, 2008 at 08:20:54AM -0400, Chris Mason wrote:
    > On Wed, 2008-10-01 at 21:52 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
    > > On Wed, 01 Oct 2008 14:40:51 -0400 Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com> wrote:
    > >
    > > > The patch below changes write_cache_pages to only use writeback_index
    > > > when current_is_pdflush(). The basic idea is that pdflush is the only
    > > > one who has concurrency control against the bdi, so it is the only one
    > > > who can safely use and update writeback_index.
    > >
    > > Another approach would be to only update mapping->writeback_index if
    > > nobody else altered it meanwhile.
    > >
    >
    > Ok, I can give that a short.
    >
    > > That being said, I don't really see why we get lots of seekiness when
    > > two threads start their writing the file from the same offset.
    >
    > For metadata, it makes sense. Pages get dirtied in strange order, and
    > if writeback_index is jumping around, we'll get the seeky metadata
    > writeback.
    >
    > Data makes less sense, especially the very high extent count from ext4.
    > An extra printk shows that ext4 is calling redirty_page_for_writepage
    > quite a bit in ext4_da_writepage. This should be enough to make us jump
    > around in the file.


    We need to do start the journal before locking the page with jbd2.
    That prevent us from doing any block allocation in writepage() call
    back. So with ext4/jbd2 we do block allocation only in writepages()
    call back where we start the journal with credit needed to write
    a single extent. Then we look for contiguous unallocated logical
    block and request the block allocator for 'x' blocks. If we get
    less than that. The rest of the pages which we iterated in
    writepages are redirtied so that we try to allocate them again.
    We loop inside ext4_da_writepages itself looking at wbc->pages_skipped

    2481 if (wbc->range_cont && (pages_skipped != wbc->pages_skipped)) {
    2482 /* We skipped pages in this loop */
    2483 wbc->range_start = range_start;
    2484 wbc->nr_to_write = to_write +


    >
    > For a 4.5GB streaming buffered write, this printk inside
    > ext4_da_writepage shows up 37,2429 times in /var/log/messages.
    >

    Part of that can happen due to shrink_page_list -> pageout -> writepagee
    call back with lots of unallocated buffer_heads(blocks). Also a journal
    commit with jbd2 looks at the inode and all the dirty pages, rather than
    the buffer_heads (journal_submit_data_buffers). We don't force commit
    pages that doesn't have blocks allocated with the ext4. The consistency
    is only with i_size and data.

    > if (page_has_buffers(page)) {
    > page_bufs = page_buffers(page);
    > if (walk_page_buffers(NULL, page_bufs, 0, len, NULL,
    > ext4_bh_unmapped_or_delay)) {
    > /*
    > * We don't want to do block allocation
    > * So redirty the page and return
    > * We may reach here when we do a journal commit
    > * via journal_submit_inode_data_buffers.
    > * If we don't have mapping block we just ignore
    > * them. We can also reach here via shrink_page_list
    > */
    > redirty_page_for_writepage(wbc, page);
    >
    > printk("redirty page %Lu\n", page_offset(page));
    >
    > unlock_page(page);
    > return 0;
    > }
    > } else {
    >
    > -chris
    >
    >

    -aneesh


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