Re: [PATCH v2 02/28] mm: Add functions to zero portions of a folio

From: Matthew Wilcox
Date: Thu Nov 18 2021 - 15:08:58 EST


On Thu, Nov 18, 2021 at 09:26:15AM -0800, Darrick J. Wong wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 18, 2021 at 03:55:12PM +0000, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > if (buffer_new(bh)) {
> > ...
> > folio_zero_segments(folio,
> > to, block_end,
> > block_start, from);
> >
> > ("zero between block_start and block_end, except for the region
> > specified by 'from' and 'to'"). Except that for some reason the
> > ranges are specified backwards, so it's not obvious what's going on.
> > Converting that to folio_zero_ranges() would be a possibility, at the
> > expense of complexity in the caller, or using 'max' instead of 'end'
> > would also add complexity to the callers.
>
> The call above looks like it is preparing to copy some data into the
> middle of a buffer by zero-initializing the bytes before and the bytes
> after that middle region.
>
> Admittedly my fs-addled brain actually finds this hot mess easier to
> understand:
>
> folio_zero_segments(folio, to, blocksize - 1, block_start, from - 1);
>
> but I suppose the xend method involves less subtraction everywhere.

That's exactly what it's doing. It's kind of funny because it's an
abstraction that permits a micro-optimisation (removing potentially one
kmap() call), but removes the opportunity for a larger optimisation
(removing several, and also removing calls to flush_dcache_folio).
That is, we could rewrite __block_write_begin_int() as:

static void *kremap_folio(void *kaddr, struct folio *folio)
{
if (kaddr)
return kaddr;
/* buffer heads only support single page folios */
return kmap_local_folio(folio, 0);
}

+ void *kaddr = NULL;
...
- if (block_end > to || block_start < from)
- folio_zero_segments(folio,
- to, block_end,
- block_start, from);
+ if (from > block_start) {
+ kaddr = kremap_folio(kaddr, folio);
+ memset(kaddr + block_start, 0,
+ block_start - from);
+ }
+ if (block_end > to) {
+ kaddr = kremap_folio(kaddr, folio);
+ memset(kaddr + to, 0, block_end - to);
+ }
...
}
+ if (kaddr) {
+ kunmap_local(kaddr);
+ flush_dcache_folio(folio);
+ }

That way if there are multiple unmapped+new buffers, we only kmap/kunmap
once per page. I don't care to submit this as a patch though ... buffer
heads just need to go away. iomap can't use an optimisation like this;
it already reports all the contiguous unmapped blocks as a single extent,
and if you have multiple unmapped extents per page, well ... I'm sorry
for you, but the overhead of kmap/kunmap is the least of your problems.

> Reviewed-by: Darrick J. Wong <djwong@xxxxxxxxxx>

Thanks. Pushed to
https://git.infradead.org/users/willy/pagecache.git/shortlog/refs/heads/for-next

I'll give that until Monday to soak and send a pull request.