From: Zheng Liu Subject: Re: [RFC] jbd2: reduce the number of writes when commiting a transacation Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:25:05 +0800 Message-ID: <20120423022505.GA7855@gmail.com> References: <20120420110627.GA30373@gmail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org To: Andreas Dilger Return-path: Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-fsdevel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-ext4.vger.kernel.org On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 05:21:59AM -0600, Andreas Dilger wrote: > On 2012-04-20, at 5:06 AM, Zheng Liu wrote: > > In this thread[1], I found a defect in jbd2 because it needs two wrties > > to finish a transacation because it writes journal header and data to > > disk and it will write commit to disk after above writes are done. > > AFAIK, in jbd2, it will call submit_bh twice at least to write the data > > because journal header, data and commit are stored in different > > buffer_heads. If we don't call them separately, these calls might be > > out of order. Obviously, it must ensure that journal header and data are written before commit. But this brings a huge overhead in this > > benchmark[2]. So, IMHO, if we could use *bio* to store these data > > rather than buffer_head, we could avoid this overhead because we can > > call submit_bio only once to write all of data, which contains journal > > header, data and commit. Here is an issue that I don't determine. If > > we use submit_bio to write journal data, it will make all of data with > > WRITE_FLUSH_FUA flag. But now there is only commit data with this flag. > > The reason that there are two separate writes is because if the write > of the commit block is reordered before the journal data, and only the > commit block is written before a crash (data is lost), then the journal > replay code may incorrectly think that the transaction is complete and > copy the unwritten (garbage) block to the wrong place. > > I think there is potentially an existing solution to this problem, > which is the async journal commit feature. It adds checksums to the > journal commit block, which allows verifying that all blocks were > written to disk properly even if the commit block is submitted at > the same time as the journal data blocks. > > One problem with this implementation is that if an intermediate > journal commit has a data corruption (i.e. checksum of all data > blocks does not match the commit block), then it is not possible > to know which block(s) contain bad data. After that, potentially > many thousands of other operations may be lost. > > We discussed a scheme to store a separate checksum for each block > in a transaction, by storing a 16-bit checksum (likely the low > 16 bits of CRC32c) into the high flags word for each block. Then, > if one or more blocks is corrupted, it is possible to skip replay > of just those blocks, and potentially they will even be overwritten > by blocks in a later transaction, requiring no e2fsck at all. Thanks for pointing out this feature. I have evaluated this feature in my benchmark, and it can dramatically improve the performance. :-) BTW, out of curiosity, why not set this feature on default? Regards, Zheng > > > I am not sure whether or not it brings some other unpridictable > > problems. :( > > > > Please feel free to comment this RFC. Thank you. > > > > 1. http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-ext4/msg31637.html > > 2. benchmark: time for((i=0;i<2000;i++)); do \ > > dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/sda1/testfile conv=notrunc bs=4k \ > > count=1 seek=`expr $i \* 16` oflag=sync,direct 2>/dev/null; \ > > done > > > > Regards, > > Zheng > > -- > > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in > > the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org > > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html > > > Cheers, Andreas > > > > > > -- > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in > the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html