Re: [PATCH v4] mm: don't cap request size based on read-ahead setting

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On 11/18/2016 11:02 AM, Johannes Weiner wrote:
On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 02:23:10PM -0700, Jens Axboe wrote:
We ran into a funky issue, where someone doing 256K buffered reads saw
128K requests at the device level. Turns out it is read-ahead capping
the request size, since we use 128K as the default setting. This doesn't
make a lot of sense - if someone is issuing 256K reads, they should see
256K reads, regardless of the read-ahead setting, if the underlying
device can support a 256K read in a single command.

To make matters more confusing, there's an odd interaction with the
fadvise hint setting. If we tell the kernel we're doing sequential IO on
this file descriptor, we can get twice the read-ahead size. But if we
tell the kernel that we are doing random IO, hence disabling read-ahead,
we do get nice 256K requests at the lower level. This is because
ondemand and forced read-ahead behave differently, with the latter doing
the right thing. An application developer will be, rightfully,
scratching his head at this point, wondering wtf is going on. A good one
will dive into the kernel source, and silently weep.

With the FADV_RANDOM part of the changelog updated, this looks good to
me. Just a few nitpicks below.

This patch introduces a bdi hint, io_pages. This is the soft max IO size
for the lower level, I've hooked it up to the bdev settings here.
Read-ahead is modified to issue the maximum of the user request size,
and the read-ahead max size, but capped to the max request size on the
device side. The latter is done to avoid reading ahead too much, if the
application asks for a huge read. With this patch, the kernel behaves
like the application expects.

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@xxxxxx>

@@ -207,12 +207,17 @@ int __do_page_cache_readahead(struct address_space
*mapping, struct file *filp,
  * memory at once.
  */
 int force_page_cache_readahead(struct address_space *mapping, struct file
*filp,

Linewrap (but you already knew that ;))

Yeah, dunno wtf happened there...

-		pgoff_t offset, unsigned long nr_to_read)
+		               pgoff_t offset, unsigned long nr_to_read)
 {
+	struct backing_dev_info *bdi = inode_to_bdi(mapping->host);
+	struct file_ra_state *ra = &filp->f_ra;
+	unsigned long max_pages;
+
 	if (unlikely(!mapping->a_ops->readpage && !mapping->a_ops->readpages))
 		return -EINVAL;

-	nr_to_read = min(nr_to_read, inode_to_bdi(mapping->host)->ra_pages);
+	max_pages = max_t(unsigned long, bdi->io_pages, ra->ra_pages);
+	nr_to_read = min(nr_to_read, max_pages);

It would be useful to have the comment on not capping below optimal IO
size from ondemand_readahead() here as well.

Good idea, I'll copy/paste the comment from the ondemand part.

@@ -369,10 +374,18 @@ ondemand_readahead(struct address_space *mapping,
 		   bool hit_readahead_marker, pgoff_t offset,
 		   unsigned long req_size)
 {
-	unsigned long max = ra->ra_pages;
+	struct backing_dev_info *bdi = inode_to_bdi(mapping->host);
+	unsigned long max_pages = ra->ra_pages;
 	pgoff_t prev_offset;

 	/*
+	 * If the request exceeds the readahead window, allow the read to
+	 * be up to the optimal hardware IO size
+	 */
+	if (req_size > max_pages && bdi->io_pages > max_pages)
+		max_pages = min(req_size, bdi->io_pages);
+
+	/*
 	 * start of file
 	 */
 	if (!offset)

Please feel free to add:

Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx>

Thanks!

--
Jens Axboe

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