On Tue, 2016-08-09 at 09:12 +1000, Dave Chinner wrote: > On Fri, Aug 05, 2016 at 07:58:33PM +0000, Boylston, Brian wrote: > > > > Dave Chinner wrote on 2016-08-05: > > > > > > [ cut to just the important points ] > > > On Thu, Aug 04, 2016 at 06:40:42PM +0000, Kani, Toshimitsu wrote: > > > > > > > > On Tue, 2016-08-02 at 10:21 +1000, Dave Chinner wrote: > > > > > > > > > > If I drop the fsync from the > > > > > buffered IO path, bandwidth remains the same but runtime > > > > > drops to 0.55-0.57s, so again the buffered IO write path is > > > > > faster than DAX while doing more work. > > > > > > > > I do not think the test results are relevant on this point > > > > because both buffered and dax write() paths use uncached copy > > > > to avoid clflush. The buffered path uses cached copy to the > > > > page cache and then use uncached copy to PMEM via writeback. > > > > Therefore, the buffered IO path also benefits from using > > > > uncached copy to avoid clflush. > > > > > > Except that I tested without the writeback path for buffered IO, > > > so there was a direct comparison for single cached copy vs single > > > uncached copy. > > > > > > The undenial fact is that a write() with a single cached copy > > > with all the overhead of dirty page tracking is /faster/ than a > > > much shorter, simpler IO path that uses an uncached copy. That's > > > what the numbers say.... > > > > > > > > > > > Cached copy (req movq) is slightly faster than uncached copy, > > > > > > Not according to Boaz - he claims that uncached is 20% faster > > > than cached. How about you two get together, do some benchmarking > > > and get your story straight, eh? > > > > > > > and should be used for writing to the page cache. For writing > > > > to PMEM, however, additional clflush can be expensive, and > > > > allocating cachelines for PMEM leads to evict application's > > > > cachelines. > > > > > > I keep hearing people tell me why cached copies are slower, but > > > no-one is providing numbers to back up their statements. The only > > > numbers we have are the ones I've published showing cached copies > > > w/ full dirty tracking is faster than uncached copy w/o dirty > > > tracking. > > > > > > Show me the numbers that back up your statements, then I'll > > > listen to you. > > > > Here are some numbers for a particular scenario, and the code is > > below. > > > > Time (in seconds) to copy a 16KiB buffer 1M times to a 4MiB NVDIMM > > buffer (1M total memcpy()s). For the cached+clflush case, the > > flushes are done every 4MiB (which seems slightly faster than > > flushing every 16KiB): > > > > NUMA local NUMA remote > > Cached+clflush 13.5 37.1 > > movnt 1.0 1.3 > > So let's put that in memory bandwidth terms. You wrote 16GB to the > NVDIMM. That means: > > NUMA local NUMA remote > Cached+clflush 1.2GB/s 0.43GB/s > movnt 16.0GB/s 12.3GB/s > > That smells wrong. The DAX code (using movnt) is not 1-2 orders of > magnitude faster than a page cache copy, so I don't believe your > benchmark reflects what I'm proposing. > > What I think you're getting wrong is that we are not doing a clflush > after every 16k write when we use the page cache, nor will we do > that if we use cached copies, dirty tracking and clflush on fsync(). As I mentioned before, we do not use clflush on the write path. So, your tests did not issue clflush at all. > IOWs, the correct equivalent "cached + clflush" loop to a volatile > copy with dirty tracking + fsync would be: > > dstp = dst; > while (--nloops) { > memcpy(dstp, src, src_sz); // pwrite(); > dstp += src_sz; > } > pmem_persist(dst, dstsz); // fsync(); > > i.e. The cache flushes occur only at the user defined > synchronisation point not on every syscall. Brian's test is (16 KiB pwrite + fsync) repeated 1M times. It compared two approaches in the case of 16 KiB persistent write. I do not cosider it wrong, but it indicated that cached copy + clflush will lead much higher overhead when sync'd in a finer granularity. I agree that it should have less overhead in total when clflush is done at once since it only has to evict as much as the cache size. > Yes, if you want to make your copy slow and safe, use O_SYNC to > trigger clflush on every write() call - that's what we do for > existing storage and the mechanisms are already there; we just need > the dirty tracking to optimise it. Perhaps, you are referring flushing on disk write cache? I do not think clflush as a x86 instruction is used for exisiting storage. > Put simple: we should only care about cache flush synchronisation at > user defined data integrity synchronisation points. That's the IO > model the kernel has always exposed to users, and pmem storage is no > different. Thanks, -Toshi��.n��������+%������w��{.n�����{�����ܨ}���Ơz�j:+v�����w����ޙ��&�)ߡ�a����z�ޗ���ݢj��w�f