Intel reported a performance regression caused by the following commit:
commit 848c4dd515
Author: Zach Brown <zach.brown@oracle.com>
Date: Mon Aug 20 17:12:01 2007 -0700
dio: zero struct dio with kzalloc instead of manually
This patch uses kzalloc to zero all of struct dio rather than
manually trying to track which fields we rely on being zero. It
passed aio+dio stress testing and some bug regression testing on
ext3.
This patch was introduced by Linus in the conversation that lead up
to Badari's minimal fix to manually zero .map_bh.b_state in commit:
6a648fa721
It makes the code a bit smaller. Maybe a couple fewer cachelines to
load, if we're lucky:
text data bss dec hex filename
3285925 568506 1304616 5159047 4eb887 vmlinux
3285797 568506 1304616 5158919 4eb807 vmlinux.patched
I was unable to measure a stable difference in the number of cpu
cycles spent in blockdev_direct_IO() when pushing aio+dio 256K reads
at ~340MB/s.
So the resulting intent of the patch isn't a performance gain but to
avoid exposing ourselves to the risk of finding another field like
.map_bh.b_state where we rely on zeroing but don't enforce it in the
code.
Zach surmised that zeroing out the page array was what caused most of
the problem, and suggested the approach taken in the attached patch for
resolving the issue. Intel re-tested with this patch and saw a 0.6%
performance gain (the original regression was 0.5%).
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: add comment]
Signed-off-by: Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Zach Brown <zach.brown@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
23aee091d8