Re: [PATCH v6 0/7] vfs: Non-blockling buffered fs read (page cache only)

[Milosz Tanski]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 1:44 AM, Dave Chinner <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 11:40:23AM -0500, Milosz Tanski wrote:
>> This patcheset introduces an ability to perform a non-blocking read from
>> regular files in buffered IO mode. This works by only for those filesystems
>> that have data in the page cache.
>>
>> It does this by introducing new syscalls new syscalls preadv2/pwritev2. These
>> new syscalls behave like the network sendmsg, recvmsg syscalls that accept an
>> extra flag argument (RWF_NONBLOCK).
>>
>> It's a very common patern today (samba, libuv, etc..) use a large threadpool to
>> perform buffered IO operations. They submit the work form another thread
>> that performs network IO and epoll or other threads that perform CPU work. This
>> leads to increased latency for processing, esp. in the case of data that's
>> already cached in the page cache.
>>
>> With the new interface the applications will now be able to fetch the data in
>> their network / cpu bound thread(s) and only defer to a threadpool if it's not
>> there. In our own application (VLDB) we've observed a decrease in latency for
>> "fast" request by avoiding unnecessary queuing and having to swap out current
>> tasks in IO bound work threads.
>
> Can you write a test (or set of) for fstests that exercises this new
> functionality? I'm not worried about performance, just
> correctness....

Sure thing. Can you point me at the fstests repo? A quick google
search reveals lots of projects named fstests, most of them abandoned.

>
> Cheers,
>
> Dave.
>
> --
> Dave Chinner
> david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx



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Milosz Tanski
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