'Commit 79ef3a8aa1 ("raid1: Rewrite the implementation of iobarrier.")'
introduces a sliding resync window for raid1 I/O barrier, this idea limits
I/O barriers to happen only inside a slidingresync window, for regular
I/Os out of this resync window they don't need to wait for barrier any
more. On large raid1 device, it helps a lot to improve parallel writing
I/O throughput when there are background resync I/Os performing at
same time.
The idea of sliding resync widow is awesome, but code complexity is a
challenge. Sliding resync window requires several variables to work
collectively, this is complexed and very hard to make it work correctly.
Just grep "Fixes: 79ef3a8aa1" in kernel git log, there are 8 more patches
to fix the original resync window patch. This is not the end, any further
related modification may easily introduce more regreassion.
Therefore I decide to implement a much simpler raid1 I/O barrier, by
removing resync window code, I believe life will be much easier.
The brief idea of the simpler barrier is,
- Do not maintain a global unique resync window
- Use multiple hash buckets to reduce I/O barrier conflicts, regular
I/O only has to wait for a resync I/O when both them have same barrier
bucket index, vice versa.
- I/O barrier can be reduced to an acceptable number if there are enough
barrier buckets
Here I explain how the barrier buckets are designed,
- BARRIER_UNIT_SECTOR_SIZE
The whole LBA address space of a raid1 device is divided into multiple
barrier units, by the size of BARRIER_UNIT_SECTOR_SIZE.
Bio requests won't go across border of barrier unit size, that means
maximum bio size is BARRIER_UNIT_SECTOR_SIZE<<9 (64MB) in bytes.
For random I/O 64MB is large enough for both read and write requests,
for sequential I/O considering underlying block layer may merge them
into larger requests, 64MB is still good enough.
Neil also points out that for resync operation, "we want the resync to
move from region to region fairly quickly so that the slowness caused
by having to synchronize with the resync is averaged out over a fairly
small time frame". For full speed resync, 64MB should take less then 1
second. When resync is competing with other I/O, it could take up a few
minutes. Therefore 64MB size is fairly good range for resync.
- BARRIER_BUCKETS_NR
There are BARRIER_BUCKETS_NR buckets in total, which is defined by,
#define BARRIER_BUCKETS_NR_BITS (PAGE_SHIFT - 2)
#define BARRIER_BUCKETS_NR (1<<BARRIER_BUCKETS_NR_BITS)
this patch makes the bellowed members of struct r1conf from integer
to array of integers,
- int nr_pending;
- int nr_waiting;
- int nr_queued;
- int barrier;
+ int *nr_pending;
+ int *nr_waiting;
+ int *nr_queued;
+ int *barrier;
number of the array elements is defined as BARRIER_BUCKETS_NR. For 4KB
kernel space page size, (PAGE_SHIFT - 2) indecates there are 1024 I/O
barrier buckets, and each array of integers occupies single memory page.
1024 means for a request which is smaller than the I/O barrier unit size
has ~0.1% chance to wait for resync to pause, which is quite a small
enough fraction. Also requesting single memory page is more friendly to
kernel page allocator than larger memory size.
- I/O barrier bucket is indexed by bio start sector
If multiple I/O requests hit different I/O barrier units, they only need
to compete I/O barrier with other I/Os which hit the same I/O barrier
bucket index with each other. The index of a barrier bucket which a
bio should look for is calculated by sector_to_idx() which is defined
in raid1.h as an inline function,
static inline int sector_to_idx(sector_t sector)
{
return hash_long(sector >> BARRIER_UNIT_SECTOR_BITS,
BARRIER_BUCKETS_NR_BITS);
}
Here sector_nr is the start sector number of a bio.
- Single bio won't go across boundary of a I/O barrier unit
If a request goes across boundary of barrier unit, it will be split. A
bio may be split in raid1_make_request() or raid1_sync_request(), if
sectors returned by align_to_barrier_unit_end() is smaller than
original bio size.
Comparing to single sliding resync window,
- Currently resync I/O grows linearly, therefore regular and resync I/O
will conflict within a single barrier units. So the I/O behavior is
similar to single sliding resync window.
- But a barrier unit bucket is shared by all barrier units with identical
barrier uinit index, the probability of conflict might be higher
than single sliding resync window, in condition that writing I/Os
always hit barrier units which have identical barrier bucket indexs with
the resync I/Os. This is a very rare condition in real I/O work loads,
I cannot imagine how it could happen in practice.
- Therefore we can achieve a good enough low conflict rate with much
simpler barrier algorithm and implementation.
There are two changes should be noticed,
- In raid1d(), I change the code to decrease conf->nr_pending[idx] into
single loop, it looks like this,
spin_lock_irqsave(&conf->device_lock, flags);
conf->nr_queued[idx]--;
spin_unlock_irqrestore(&conf->device_lock, flags);
This change generates more spin lock operations, but in next patch of
this patch set, it will be replaced by a single line code,
atomic_dec(&conf->nr_queueud[idx]);
So we don't need to worry about spin lock cost here.
- Mainline raid1 code split original raid1_make_request() into
raid1_read_request() and raid1_write_request(). If the original bio
goes across an I/O barrier unit size, this bio will be split before
calling raid1_read_request() or raid1_write_request(), this change
the code logic more simple and clear.
- In this patch wait_barrier() is moved from raid1_make_request() to
raid1_write_request(). In raid_read_request(), original wait_barrier()
is replaced by raid1_read_request().
The differnece is wait_read_barrier() only waits if array is frozen,
using different barrier function in different code path makes the code
more clean and easy to read.
Changelog
V4:
- Add alloc_r1bio() to remove redundant r1bio memory allocation code.
- Fix many typos in patch comments.
- Use (PAGE_SHIFT - ilog2(sizeof(int))) to define BARRIER_BUCKETS_NR_BITS.
V3:
- Rebase the patch against latest upstream kernel code.
- Many fixes by review comments from Neil,
- Back to use pointers to replace arraries in struct r1conf
- Remove total_barriers from struct r1conf
- Add more patch comments to explain how/why the values of
BARRIER_UNIT_SECTOR_SIZE and BARRIER_BUCKETS_NR are decided.
- Use get_unqueued_pending() to replace get_all_pendings() and
get_all_queued()
- Increase bucket number from 512 to 1024
- Change code comments format by review from Shaohua.
V2:
- Use bio_split() to split the orignal bio if it goes across barrier unit
bounday, to make the code more simple, by suggestion from Shaohua and
Neil.
- Use hash_long() to replace original linear hash, to avoid a possible
confilict between resync I/O and sequential write I/O, by suggestion from
Shaohua.
- Add conf->total_barriers to record barrier depth, which is used to
control number of parallel sync I/O barriers, by suggestion from Shaohua.
- In V1 patch the bellowed barrier buckets related members in r1conf are
allocated in memory page. To make the code more simple, V2 patch moves
the memory space into struct r1conf, like this,
- int nr_pending;
- int nr_waiting;
- int nr_queued;
- int barrier;
+ int nr_pending[BARRIER_BUCKETS_NR];
+ int nr_waiting[BARRIER_BUCKETS_NR];
+ int nr_queued[BARRIER_BUCKETS_NR];
+ int barrier[BARRIER_BUCKETS_NR];
This change is by the suggestion from Shaohua.
- Remove some inrelavent code comments, by suggestion from Guoqing.
- Add a missing wait_barrier() before jumping to retry_write, in
raid1_make_write_request().
V1:
- Original RFC patch for comments
Signed-off-by: Coly Li <colyli@suse.de>
Cc: Johannes Thumshirn <jthumshirn@suse.de>
Cc: Guoqing Jiang <gqjiang@suse.com>
Reviewed-by: Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Shaohua Li <shli@fb.com>