Re: Block layer projects that I haven't had time for

[Dongsu Park]

Hi Kent,

On 23.11.2014 20:16, Kent Overstreet wrote:
> Since I'm starting to resign myself to the fact that I'm probably not going to
> have much time for upstream development again any time soon, I figured maybe I
> should try writing down all the things I was working on or planning on working
> on in case someone else is feeling ambitious and looking for things to work on.
> 
> If anyone wants to take up any of this stuff, feel free to take my half baked
> code and do whatever you want with it, or ping me for ideas/guidance.

I'm interested in taking up your work and further implement it.
IMHO the 1st and 2nd items, making generic_make_request() take arbitrarily
sized bios, are the essential ones. With those changes, individual block
drivers wouldn't have to define ->merge_bvec_fn() any more.

Playing a little with your block_stuff tree based on 3.15, however,
I think there still seems to be a couple of issues.
First of all, it doesn't work with virtio-blk. A testing Qemu VM panics
at the very early stage of booting. This issue should be addressed as
the first step, so that other parts can be tested.

Moreover, I've already tried to rebase these patches on top of current
mainline, 3.18-rc7. It's now compilable, but it seems to introduce
more bugs about direct-IO. I didn't manage to find out the reason.
I'd need to also look at the previous review comments in [1], [2].

Don't you have other trees based on top of 3.17 or higher?
If not, can I create my own tree based on 3.18-rc7 to publish?

Thanks,
Dongsu

[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/11/25/732
[2] https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/2/26/618

>  - immutable biovecs went in, but what this was leading up to was making
>    generic_make_request() accept arbitrary size bios, and pushing the splitting
>    down to the drivers or wherever it's required.
> 
>    This is a performance win, and a big reduction in complexity and allows a lot
>    of code to be deleted. The performance win is because bio_add_page() doesn't
>    have to check anything except "does this page fit in the current bio" -
>    checking queue limits is like multiple cache misses. That stuff isn't checked
>    until the driver level - when the relevant stuff is going to be in cache
>    anyways - and usually bios won't have to be split. If they do have to be
>    split, it's quite cheap now.
> 
>    I actually benchmarked the impact of this with fio on a micron p320h, it's
>    definitely a measurable impact.
> 
>    It's also the last thing needed for the dio rewrite I was working on (god,
>    who knows when I'll have time for _that_, the code is mostly done :/) - and
>    the performance impact of that is _very_ significant.
> 
>  - making generic_make_request() take arbitrary size bios means we can delete
>    merge_bvec_fn, which deletes over 1k loc. This is done in my tree, needs
>    rebasing and testing.
> 
>  - kill bio->bi_cnt
> 
>    I added bi_remaning and bio_chain() awhile back - but now we have two atomic
>    refcounts in struct bio and really we don't need both, bi_remaining is more
>    general.
> 
>    If you grep there aren't that many uses of bio_get(), most of them are
>    straightforward to get rid of but there were one or two tricky ones. Don't
>    remember which ones, though.
> 
>  - plugging
> 
>    that code in generic_make_request() that turns recursion into iteration - if
>    you squint, what's really going on is that it's another plugging
>    implementation.
> 
>    What I'd like to do (only started playing with this) is rework the existing
>    plugging to work in terms of bios, not requests - I think this would simplify
>    things, and would allow non request based drivers to take advantage of
>    plugging (it'd be useful for icache if nothing else).
> 
>    Then, replace the open coded plugging in generic_make_request() with a normal
>    plug, and in the scheduler hook (where right now we would recurse and
>    potentially blow the stack if we did this) - check the current stack usage,
>    and if it's over some threshold punt the bios to per request queue
>    workqueues.
> 
>    If anyone remembers the hack I added to bio_alloc_bioset() awhile back (where
>    if we're about to block on allocating from the mempool, we punt any bios
>    stranded on current->bio_list to workqueues - so as to avoid deadlocking) -
>    this would actually replace that hack.
> 
>  - multipage bvecs
> 
>    I did a lot of the work to implement this _ages_ ago, it turns out to not be
>    that bad it terms of amount of code that has to be changed. The trick is, we
>    just add a new bio_for_each_page() macro - analagous to
>    bio_for_each_segment() - that iterates over each page in a bvec separately;
>    that way we don't have to modify all the code that expects bios to contain
>    single pages.
> 
>    One of the reasons this is nice is because we can move segment merging up to
>    bio_add_page(). Conceptually, right now we're breaking an IO up into single
>    page segments to submit it in only for the lower layers to undo that work,
>    and merge the segments back together. It's a lot simpler to just submit IOs
>    with segments already merged; this does mean that a driver (when it calls
>    blk_bio_map_sg()) will potentially have to split segments that are too big
>    for the device limits, but remember we want to push bio splitting down to the
>    driver anyways so this is actually completely trivial - the model is just
>    that the driver incrementally consumes the bio/request.
> 
>    This is nice for the upper layers in small ways too, and might help to enable
>    other changes we want but I have only a hazy idea of what those might be.
>  
>  - my dio rewrite, if anyone is feeling really ambitious
> 
> If anyone wants to take a look at my (mostly mostly quite messy, and out of
> date) in progress work - it's in a branch:
> 
> http://evilpiepirate.org/git/linux-bcache.git block_stuff
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