[PATCH] mm: readahead: do not cap readahead() and MADV_WILLNEED

From: Johannes Weiner
Date: Tue Feb 23 2016 - 20:38:59 EST


All readahead is currently capped to a maximum of the device readahead
limit, which defaults to 128k. For heuristics-based readahead this
makes perfect sense, too, but unfortunately the limit is also applied
to the explicit readahead() or madvise(MADV_WILLNEED) syscalls, and
128k is an awfully low limit, particularly for bigger machines. It's
not unreasonable for a user on a 100G machine to say, read this 1G
file, and read it now, I'm going to access the whole thing shortly.

Since both readahead() and MADV_WILLNEED take an explicit length
parameter, it seems weird to truncate that request quietly. Just do
what the user asked for and leave the limiting to the heuristics.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx>
---
mm/readahead.c | 2 +-
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/mm/readahead.c b/mm/readahead.c
index 20e58e8..6d182db 100644
--- a/mm/readahead.c
+++ b/mm/readahead.c
@@ -212,7 +212,6 @@ int force_page_cache_readahead(struct address_space *mapping, struct file *filp,
if (unlikely(!mapping->a_ops->readpage && !mapping->a_ops->readpages))
return -EINVAL;

- nr_to_read = min(nr_to_read, inode_to_bdi(mapping->host)->ra_pages);
while (nr_to_read) {
int err;

@@ -485,6 +484,7 @@ void page_cache_sync_readahead(struct address_space *mapping,

/* be dumb */
if (filp && (filp->f_mode & FMODE_RANDOM)) {
+ req_size = min(req_size, inode_to_bdi(mapping->host)->ra_pages);
force_page_cache_readahead(mapping, filp, offset, req_size);
return;
}
--
2.7.1