Re: [BUG][ext2] XIP does not work on ext2

[Andiry Xu]

On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 2:20 PM, Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu 07-11-13 13:50:09, Andiry Xu wrote:
>> On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 1:07 PM, Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>> > On Thu 07-11-13 12:14:13, Andiry Xu wrote:
>> >> On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 1:18 PM, Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>> >> > On Tue 05-11-13 17:28:35, Andiry Xu wrote:
>> >> >> >> Do you know the reason why write() outperforms mmap() in some cases? I
>> >> >> >> know it's not related the thread but I really appreciate if you can
>> >> >> >> answer my question.
>> >> >> >   Well, I'm not completely sure. mmap()ed memory always works on page-by-page
>> >> >> > basis - you first access the page, it gets faulted in and you can further
>> >> >> > access it. So for small (sub page size) accesses this is a win because you
>> >> >> > don't have an overhead of syscall and fs write path. For accesses larger
>> >> >> > than page size the overhead of syscall and some initial checks is well
>> >> >> > hidden by other things. I guess write() ends up being more efficient
>> >> >> > because write path taken for each page is somewhat lighter than full page
>> >> >> > fault. But you'd need to look into perf data to get some hard numbers on
>> >> >> > where the time is spent.
>> >> >> >
>> >> >>
>> >> >> Thanks for the reply. However I have filled up the whole RAM disk
>> >> >> before doing the test, i.e. asked the brd driver to allocate all the
>> >> >> pages initially.
>> >> >   Well, pages in ramdisk are always present, that's not an issue. But you
>> >> > will get a page fault to map a particular physical page in process'
>> >> > virtual address space when you first access that virtual address in the
>> >> > mapping from the process. The cost of setting up this virtual->physical
>> >> > mapping is what I'm talking about.
>> >> >
>> >>
>> >> Yes, you are right, there are page faults observed with perf. I
>> >> misunderstood page fault as copying pages between backing store and
>> >> physical memory.
>> >>
>> >> > If you had a process which first mmaps the file and writes to all pages in
>> >> > the mapping and *then* measure the cost of another round of writing to the
>> >> > mapping, I would expect you should see speeds close to those of memory bus.
>> >> >
>> >>
>> >> I've tried this as well. mmap() performance improves but still not as
>> >> good as write().
>> >> I used the perf report to compare write() and mmap() applications. For
>> >> write() version, top of perf report shows as:
>> >> 33.33%  __copy_user_nocache
>> >> 4.72%    ext2_get_blocks
>> >> 4.42%    mutex_unlock
>> >> 3.59%    __find_get_block
>> >>
>> >> which looks reasonable.
>> >>
>> >> However, for mmap() version, the perf report looks strange:
>> >> 94.98% libc-2.15.so       [.] 0x000000000014698d
>> >> 2.25%   page_fault
>> >> 0.18%   handle_mm_fault
>> >>
>> >> I don't know what the first item is but it took the majority of cycles.
>> >   The first item means that it's some userspace code in libc. My guess
>> > would be that it's libc's memcpy() function (or whatever you use to write
>> > to mmap). How do you access the mmap?
>> >
>>
>> Like this:
>>
>> fd = open(file_name, O_CREAT | O_RDWR | O_DIRECT, 0755);
>> dest = (char *)mmap(NULL, FILE_SIZE, PROT_WRITE, MAP_SHARED, fd, 0);
>> for (i = 0; i < count; i++)
>> {
>>        memcpy(dest, src, request_size);
>>        dest += request_size;
>> }
>   OK, maybe libc memcpy isn't very well optimized for you cpu? Not sure how
> to tune that though...
>

Hmm, I will try some different kinds of memcpy to see if there is a
difference. Just want to make sure I do not make some stupid mistakes
before trying that.
Thanks a lot for your help!

Thanks,
Andiry
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