ext4: allow concurrent unaligned dio overwrites
authorBrian Foster <bfoster@redhat.com>
Tue, 14 Mar 2023 13:07:59 +0000 (09:07 -0400)
committerTheodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Mon, 26 Jun 2023 23:35:12 +0000 (19:35 -0400)
commit310ee0902b8d9d0a13a5a13e94688a5863fa29c2
treee611df5b49ef7fb07e662f51c1574824cfcc43ca
parent4c0cfebdf3c34c9cd2c55844f549fa46b1da3164
ext4: allow concurrent unaligned dio overwrites

We've had reports of significant performance regression of sub-block
(unaligned) direct writes due to the added exclusivity restrictions
in ext4. The purpose of the exclusivity requirement for unaligned
direct writes is to avoid data corruption caused by unserialized
partial block zeroing in the iomap dio layer across overlapping
writes.

XFS has similar requirements for the same underlying reasons, yet
doesn't suffer the extreme performance regression that ext4 does.
The reason for this is that XFS utilizes IOMAP_DIO_OVERWRITE_ONLY
mode, which allows for optimistic submission of concurrent unaligned
I/O and kicks back writes that require partial block zeroing such
that they can be submitted in a safe, exclusive context. Since ext4
already performs most of these checks pre-submission, it can support
something similar without necessarily relying on the iomap flag and
associated retry mechanism.

Update the dio write submission path to allow concurrent submission
of unaligned direct writes that are purely overwrite and so will not
require block zeroing. To improve readability of the various related
checks, move the unaligned I/O handling down into
ext4_dio_write_checks(), where the dio draining and force wait logic
can immediately follow the locking requirement checks. Finally, the
IOMAP_DIO_OVERWRITE_ONLY flag is set to enable a warning check as a
precaution should the ext4 overwrite logic ever become inconsistent
with the zeroing expectations of iomap dio.

The performance improvement of sub-block direct write I/O is shown
in the following fio test on a 64xcpu guest vm:

Test: fio --name=test --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --group_reporting
--overwrite=1 --thread --size=10G --filename=/mnt/fio
--readwrite=write --ramp_time=10s --runtime=60s --numjobs=8
--blocksize=2k --iodepth=256 --allow_file_create=0

v6.2: write: IOPS=4328, BW=8724KiB/s
v6.2 (patched): write: IOPS=801k, BW=1565MiB/s

Signed-off-by: Brian Foster <bfoster@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Ritesh Harjani (IBM) <ritesh.list@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20230314130759.642710-1-bfoster@redhat.com
Signed-off-by: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
fs/ext4/file.c