From: "Matthew Wilcox (Oracle)" <willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> By definition, an extent covers a range of consecutive blocks, so it would be quite rare to be able to just add pages to the BIO from a previous range. The only case we can think of is a mapped extent followed by a hole extent, followed by another mapped extent which has been allocated immediately after the first extent. We believe this to be an unlikely layout for a filesystem to choose and, since the queue is plugged, those two BIOs would be merged by the block layer. The reason we care is that ext2/ext4 choose to lay out blocks 0-11 consecutively, followed by the indirect block, and we want to merge those two BIOs. If we don't submit the data BIO before asking the filesystem for the next extent, then the indirect BIO will be submitted first, and waited for, leading to inefficient I/O patterns. Signed-off-by: Matthew Wilcox (Oracle) <willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> --- fs/iomap/buffered-io.c | 5 +++++ 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+) diff --git a/fs/iomap/buffered-io.c b/fs/iomap/buffered-io.c index 83438b3257de..8d26920ddf00 100644 --- a/fs/iomap/buffered-io.c +++ b/fs/iomap/buffered-io.c @@ -388,6 +388,11 @@ iomap_readahead_actor(struct inode *inode, loff_t pos, loff_t length, ctx, iomap, srcmap); } + if (ctx->bio) { + submit_bio(ctx->bio); + ctx->bio = NULL; + } + return done; } -- 2.25.1