On Fri, 29 Dec 2006 14:42:51 -0800 (PST)
Linus Torvalds <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, 29 Dec 2006, Andrew Morton wrote:
> >
> > - The above change means that we do extra writeout. If a page is dirtied
> > once, kjournald will write it and then pdflush will come along and
> > needlessly write it again.
>
> There's zero extra writeout for any flushing that flushes BY PAGES.
>
> Only broken flushers that flush by buffer heads (which really really
> really shouldn't be done any more: welcome to the 21st century) will cause
> extra writeouts. And those extra writeouts are obviously required for all
> the dirty state to actually hit the disk - which is the point of the
> patch.
>
> So they're not "extra" - they are "required for correct working".
They're extra. As in "can be optimised away".
> But I can't stress the fact enough that people SHOULD NOT do writeback by
> buffer heads. The buffer head has been purely an "IO entity" for the last
> several years now, and it's not a cache entity.
The buffer_head is not an IO container. It is the kernel's core
representation of a disk block. Usually (but not always) it is backed by
some memory which is in pagecache. We can feed buffer_heads into IO
containers via submit_bh(), but that's far from the only thing we use
buffer_heads for. We should have done s/buffer_head/block/g years ago.
JBD implements physical block-based journalling, so it is 100% appropriate
that JBD deal with these disk blocks using their buffer_head
representation.
That being said, ordered-data mode isn't really part of the JBD journalling
system at all (the data doesn't get journalled!) - ordered-mode is an
add-on to the JBD journal to make the metadata which we're about to journal
point at more-likely-to-be-correct data.
JBD's ordered-mode writeback is just a sync and I see no conceptual
problems with killing its old buffer_head based sync and moving it into the
21st century.
> Anybody who does writeback
> by buffer heads is basically bypassing the real cache (the page cache),
> and that's why all the problems happen.
>
> I think ext3 is terminally crap by now. It still uses buffer heads in
> places where it really really shouldn't,
The ordered-data mode flush: sure. The rest of JBD's use of buffer_heads
is quite appropriate.
> and as a result, things like
> directory accesses are simply slower than they should be. Sadly, I don't
> think ext4 is going to fix any of this, either.
I thought I fixed the performance problem?
Somewhat nastily, but as ext3 directories are metadata it is appropriate
that modifications to them be done in terms of buffer_heads (ie: blocks).
> It's all just too inherently wrongly designed around the buffer head
> (which was correct in 1995, but hasn't been correct for a long time in the
> kernel any more).
>
> > - Poor old IO accounting broke again.
>
> No. That's why I used "set_page_dirty()" and did it that strange ugly way
> ("set page dirty, even though it's already dirty, and even though the very
> next thing we will do is TestClearPageDirty???").
nfs_set_page_dirty() and reiserfs_set_page_dirty() should now bail if
PageDirty() to avoid needless work.
> > - For a long time I've wanted to nuke the current ext3/jbd ordered-data
> > implementation altogether, and just make kjournald call into the
> > standard writeback code to do a standard suberblock->inodes->pages walk.
>
> I really would like to see less of the buffer-head-based stuff, and yes,
> more of the normal inode page walking. I don't think you can "order"
> accesses within a page anyway, exactly because of memory mapping issues,
> so any page ordering is not about buffer heads on the page itself, it
> should be purely about metadata.
In this context ext3's "ordered" mode means "sync the file contents before
journalling the metadata which points at it".
> > - It's pretty obnoxious that the VM now sets a clean page "dirty" and
> > then proceeds to modify its contents. It would be nice to stop doing
> > that.
>
> No. I think this really the fundamental confusion people had. People
> thought that setting the page dirty meant that it was no longer being
> modified.
No. Setting a page (or bh, or inode) dirty means "this is known to have
been modified". ie: this cached entity is now out of sync with backing
store.
Ho hum. I don't care much, really. But then, I understand how all this
stuff works. Try explaining to someone the relationship between
pte-dirtiness, page-dirtiness, radix-tree-dirtiness and
buffer_head-dirtiness.
-
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