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>