Re: [PATCH v2 0/3] Bitmap percentage flushing

From: Jonathan Derrick
Date: Sat Oct 15 2022 - 18:28:18 EST




On 10/14/2022 3:10 PM, John Stoffel wrote:
>>>>>> "Jonathan" == Jonathan Derrick <jonathan.derrick@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
>> This introduces a percentage-flushing mechanism that works in-tandem to the
>> mdadm delay timer. The percentage argument is based on the number of chunks
>> dirty (rather than percentage), due to large drives requiring smaller and
>> smaller percentages (eg, 32TB drives-> 1% is 320GB).
>
> I've been reading and re-reading this and I still don't understand
> what you're saying here. You say you're adding a percentage based
> mechanism, but then you say it's based on chunk counts, not
> percentages. I think you need to clean this up and re-word it.>
> Maybe you're trying to say that you only take a percentage of the
> available write bandwidth per second or something like that?
I'll adjust it to chunk-count-based in the cover letter and make sure it
specifies bandwidth. I figured the chunk-count-based was a good way to
cover the desired percentage-based feature [1].

[1] https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/latest/source/drivers/md/md-bitmap.c#L16


>
>
>> This set hopes to provide a way to make the bitmap flushing more consistent. It
>> was observed that a synchronous, random write qd1 workload, could make bitmap
>> writes easily become almost half of the I/O. And in similar workloads with
>> different timing, it was several minutes between bitmap updates. This is too
>> inconsistent to be reliable.
>
>> This first and second patches adds the flush_threshold parameter. The default
>> value of 0 defines the default behavior: unplugging immediately just as before.
>> With a flush-threshold value of 1, it becomes more consistent and paranoid,
>> flushing on nearly every I/O, leading to a 40% or greater situation. From
>
> What situation? Please be more clear here.

40% or more of given workload I/Os being bitmap flushes.
Will be more clear in v3

>
>> there, the flush_threshold can be defined higher for those situations where
>> power loss is rare and full resync can be tolerated.
>
>> The third patch converts the daemon worker to an actual timer. This makes it
>> more consistent and removes some ugly code.
>
>> Jonathan Derrick (3):
>> md/bitmap: Add chunk-threshold unplugging
>> md/bitmap: Add sysfs interface for flush threshold
>> md/bitmap: Convert daemon_work to proper timer
>
>> Documentation/admin-guide/md.rst | 5 ++
>> drivers/md/md-bitmap.c | 98 +++++++++++++++++++++++++-------
>> drivers/md/md-bitmap.h | 4 +-
>> drivers/md/md.c | 9 ++-
>> drivers/md/md.h | 2 +
>> 5 files changed, 93 insertions(+), 25 deletions(-)
>
>> --
>> 2.31.1
>