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Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 00:34:50 +0200
From: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
To: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
       linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, tytso@mit.edu, chris.mason@oracle.com,
       david@fromorbit.com, hch@infradead.org, jack@suse.cz,
       yanmin_zhang@linux.intel.com, richard@rsk.demon.co.uk,
       damien.wyart@free.fr
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/11] Per-bdi writeback flusher threads v9
Message-ID: <20090604223449.GA13780@nowhere>
References: <1243511204-2328-1-git-send-email-jens.axboe@oracle.com> <20090604152040.GA6007@nowhere> <20090604120726.708a2211.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <20090604191309.GA4862@nowhere> <20090604195013.GB11363@kernel.dk> <20090604201012.GD11363@kernel.dk>
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On Thu, Jun 04, 2009 at 10:10:12PM +0200, Jens Axboe wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 04 2009, Jens Axboe wrote:
> > On Thu, Jun 04 2009, Frederic Weisbecker wrote:
> > > On Thu, Jun 04, 2009 at 12:07:26PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > > On Thu, 4 Jun 2009 17:20:44 +0200 Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > > I've just tested it on UP in a single disk.
> > > > 
> > > > I must say, I'm stunned at the amount of testing which people are
> > > > performing on this patchset.  Normally when someone sends out a
> > > > patchset it just sort of lands with a dull thud.
> > > > 
> > > > I'm not sure what Jens did right to make all this happen, but thanks!
> > > 
> > > 
> > > I don't know how he did either. I was reading theses patches and *something*
> > > pushed me to my testbox, and then I tested...
> > > 
> > > Jens, how do you do that?
> > 
> > Heh, not sure :-)
> > 
> > But indeed, thanks for the testing. It looks quite interesting. I'm
> > guessing it probably has to do with who ends up doing the balancing and
> > that the flusher threads block, it may change the picture a bit. So it
> > may just be that it'll require a few vm tweaks. I'll definitely look
> > into it and try and reproduce your results.
> > 
> > Did you run it a 2nd time on each drive and check if the results were
> > (approximately) consistent on the two drives?
> 
> each partition... What IO scheduler did you use on hda?


CFQ.

 
> The main difference with this test case is that before we had two super
> blocks, each with lists of dirty inodes. pdflush would attack those. Now
> we have both the inodes from the two supers on a single set of lists on
> the bdi. So either we have some ordering issue there (which is causing
> the unfairness), or something else is.


Yeah.
But although these flushers are per-bdi, with a single list (well, three)
of dirty inodes, it looks like the writeback is still performed per
superblock, I mean the bdi work gives the concerned superblock
and the bdi list is iterated in generic_sync_wb_inodes() which
only processes the inodes for the given superblock. So there is
a bit of a per superblock serialization there and....


(Note, the above is just written for myself in the secret hope I could
understand better these patches by writing my brainstorming...)


> So perhaps you can try with noop on hda to see if that changes the
> picture?


The result with noop is even more impressive.

See: http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/frederic/dbench-noop.pdf

Also a comparison, noop with pdflush against noop with bdi writeback:

http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/frederic/dbench-noop-cmp.pdf


Frederic.

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