Re: [PATCH v4] mm: don't cap request size based on read-ahead setting

[Jens Axboe]

On 11/17/2016 10:58 PM, Hillf Danton wrote:
> On Friday, November 18, 2016 5:23 AM Jens Axboe wrote:
> > We ran into a funky issue, where someone doing 256K buffered reads saw
> > 128K requests at the device level. Turns out it is read-ahead capping
> > the request size, since we use 128K as the default setting. This doesn't
> > make a lot of sense - if someone is issuing 256K reads, they should see
> > 256K reads, regardless of the read-ahead setting, if the underlying
> > device can support a 256K read in a single command.
> >
> > To make matters more confusing, there's an odd interaction with the
> > fadvise hint setting. If we tell the kernel we're doing sequential IO on
> > this file descriptor, we can get twice the read-ahead size. But if we
> > tell the kernel that we are doing random IO, hence disabling read-ahead,
> > we do get nice 256K requests at the lower level. This is because
> > ondemand and forced read-ahead behave differently, with the latter doing
> > the right thing.
>
> As far as I read, forced RA is innocent but it is corrected below.
> And with RA disabled, we should drop care of ondemand.
>
> I'm scratching.

The changelog should have been updated. Forced read-ahead is also
affected, the patch is correct. We want to use the min of 'nr_to_read'
and the proper read-ahead request size, the latter being the max of
ra->ra_pages and bdi->io_pages.

--
Jens Axboe