On Sat, May 26, 2018 at 12:02 AM, Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > On Fri, 25 May 2018, Dan Williams wrote: > >> On Fri, May 25, 2018 at 5:51 AM, Mike Snitzer <snitzer@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> > On Fri, May 25 2018 at 2:17am -0400, >> > Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> > >> >> On Thu, 24 May 2018, Dan Williams wrote: >> >> >> >> > I don't want to grow driver-local wrappers for pmem. You should use >> >> > memcpy_flushcache directly() and if an architecture does not define >> >> > memcpy_flushcache() then don't allow building dm-writecache, i.e. this >> >> > driver should 'depends on CONFIG_ARCH_HAS_UACCESS_FLUSHCACHE'. I don't >> >> > see a need to add a standalone flush operation if all relevant archs >> >> > provide memcpy_flushcache(). As for commit, I'd say just use wmb() >> >> > directly since all archs define it. Alternatively we could introduce >> >> > memcpy_flushcache_relaxed() to be the un-ordered version of the copy >> >> > routine and memcpy_flushcache() would imply a wmb(). >> >> >> >> But memcpy_flushcache() on ARM64 is slow. >> >> Right, so again, what is wrong with memcpy_flushcache_relaxed() + >> wmb() or otherwise making memcpy_flushcache() ordered. I do not see >> that as a trailblazing requirement, I see that as typical review and a >> reduction of the operation space that you are proposing. > > memcpy_flushcache on ARM64 is generally wrong thing to do, because it is > slower than memcpy and explicit cache flush. > > Suppose that you want to write data to a block device and make it > persistent. So you send a WRITE bio and then a FLUSH bio. > > Now - how to implement these two bios on persistent memory: > > On X86, the WRITE bio does memcpy_flushcache() and the FLUSH bio does > wmb() - this is the optimal implementation. > > But on ARM64, memcpy_flushcache() is suboptimal. On ARM64, the optimal > implementation is that the WRITE bio does just memcpy() and the FLUSH bio > does arch_wb_cache_pmem() on the affected range. > > Why is memcpy_flushcache() is suboptimal on ARM? The ARM architecture > doesn't have non-temporal stores. So, memcpy_flushcache() is implemented > as memcpy() followed by a cache flush. > > Now - if you flush the cache immediatelly after memcpy, the cache is full > of dirty lines and the cache-flushing code has to write these lines back > and that is slow. > > If you flush the cache some time after memcpy (i.e. when the FLUSH bio is > received), the processor already flushed some part of the cache on its > own, so the cache-flushing function has less work to do and it is faster. > > So the conclusion is - don't use memcpy_flushcache on ARM. This problem > cannot be fixed by a better implementation of memcpy_flushcache. It sounds like ARM might be better off with mapping its pmem as write-through rather than write-back, and skip the explicit cache management altogether. You speak of "optimal" and "sub-optimal", but what would be more clear is fio measurements of the relative IOPs and latency profiles of the different approaches. The reason I am continuing to push here is that reducing the operation space from 'copy-flush-commit' to just 'copy' or 'copy-commit' simplifies the maintenance long term. -- dm-devel mailing list dm-devel@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/dm-devel
