Re: [PATCH 05/10] block: remove per-queue plugging

From: hch@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Mon Apr 11 2011 - 21:13:26 EST


On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 02:48:45PM +0200, Jens Axboe wrote:
> Great, once you do that and XFS kills the blk_flush_plug() calls too,
> then we can remove that export and make it internal only.

Linus pulled the tree, so they are gone now. Btw, there's still some
bits in the area that confuse me:

- what's the point of the queue_sync_plugs? It has a lot of comment
that seem to pre-data the onstack plugging, but except for that
it's trivial wrapper around blk_flush_plug, with an argument
that is not used.
- is there a good reason for the existance of __blk_flush_plug? You'd
get one additional instruction in the inlined version of
blk_flush_plug when opencoding, but avoid the need for chained
function calls.
- Why is having a plug in blk_flush_plug marked unlikely? Note that
unlikely is the static branch prediction hint to mark the case
extremly unlikely and is even used for hot/cold partitioning. But
when we call it we usually check beforehand if we actually have
plugs, so it's actually likely to happen.
- what is the point of blk_finish_plug? All callers have
the plug on stack, and there's no good reason for adding the NULL
check. Note that blk_start_plug doesn't have the NULL check either.
- Why does __blk_flush_plug call __blk_finish_plug which might clear
tsk->plug, just to set it back after the call? When manually inlining
__blk_finish_plug ino __blk_flush_plug it looks like:

void __blk_flush_plug(struct task_struct *tsk, struct blk_plug *plug)
{
flush_plug_list(plug);
if (plug == tsk->plug)
tsk->plug = NULL;
tsk->plug = plug;
}

it would seem much smarted to just call flush_plug_list directly.
In fact it seems like the tsk->plug is not nessecary at all and
all remaining __blk_flush_plug callers could be replaced with
flush_plug_list.

- and of course the remaining issue of why io_schedule needs an
expliciy blk_flush_plug when schedule() already does one in
case it actually needs to schedule.

--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/