Huge XFS regression in 2.6.32 upto 2.6.38

From: raz ben yehuda
Date: Tue Apr 12 2011 - 03:53:42 EST


Christoph Hello
I am testing 2.6.38 with AIM benchmark.
I compared 2.6.38 to 2.6.27 and I noticed that 2.6.27 is much better than 2.6.38 when
doing sync random writes test over an xfs regular file over native Linux partition on top common sata disk.
I git bisected the problem and I reached this SHA1:
commit 13e6d5cdde0e785aa943810f08b801cadd0935df
Author: Christoph Hellwig <hch@xxxxxx>
Date: Mon Aug 31 21:00:31 2009 -0300

xfs: merge fsync and O_SYNC handling

The guarantees for O_SYNC are exactly the same as the ones we need to
make for an fsync call (and given that Linux O_SYNC is O_DSYNC the
equivalent is fdadatasync, but we treat both the same in XFS), except
with a range data writeout. Jan Kara has started unifying these two
path for filesystems using the generic helpers, and I've started to
look at XFS.
...


The bellow two tests presents the how different performance is before and patch:
#test 16) bisect 11
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Test Test Elapsed Iteration Iteration Operation
Number Name Time (sec) Count Rate (loops/sec) Rate (ops/sec)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 sync_disk_rw 30.71 19 0.61869 1583.85 Sync Random Disk Writes (K)/second
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

#test 17 ) bisect 12
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 sync_disk_rw 69.05 1 0.01448 37.07 Sync Random Disk Writes (K)/second
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Regards
Raz Ben-Yehuda


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