Hello, v2 -> v3 1. Switched to suggested approach from Jan to make the approach general for all file writes rather than only for DAX. (So as of now both DAX & DIO should benefit from this as both uses the same iomap path. Although note that I only tested performance improvement for DAX) Gave a run on xfstests with -g quick,dax and didn't observe any new issues with this patch. In case of file writes, currently we start a journal txn irrespective of whether it's an overwrite or not. In case of an overwrite we don't need to start a jbd2 txn since the blocks are already allocated. So this patch optimizes away the txn start in case of file (DAX/DIO) overwrites. This could significantly boost performance for multi-threaded writes specially random writes (overwrite). Fio script used to collect perf numbers is mentioned below. Below numbers were calculated on a QEMU setup on ppc64 box with simulated pmem (fsdax) device. Didn't observe any new failures with this patch in xfstests "-g quick,dax" Performance numbers with different threads - (~10x improvement) ========================================== vanilla_kernel(kIOPS) (randomwrite) 60 +-+------+-------+--------+--------+--------+-------+------+-+ | + + + +** + + | 55 +-+ ** +-+ | ** ** | | ** ** | 50 +-+ ** ** +-+ | ** ** | 45 +-+ ** ** +-+ | ** ** | | ** ** | 40 +-+ ** ** +-+ | ** ** | 35 +-+ ** ** ** +-+ | ** ** ** ** | | ** ** ** ** ** | 30 +-+ ** ** ** ** ** ** +-+ | ** +** +** +** ** +** | 25 +-+------**------+**------+**------+**------**------+**----+-+ 1 2 4 8 12 16 Threads patched_kernel(kIOPS) (randomwrite) 600 +-+-----+--------+--------+-------+--------+-------+------+-+ | + + + + + +** | | ** | 500 +-+ ** +-+ | ** | | ** ** | 400 +-+ ** ** +-+ | ** ** | 300 +-+ ** ** ** +-+ | ** ** ** | | ** ** ** | 200 +-+ ** ** ** +-+ | ** ** ** ** | | ** ** ** ** | 100 +-+ ** ** ** ** ** +-+ | ** ** ** ** ** | | +** +** ** +** +** +** | 0 +-+-----+**------+**------**------+**------+**-----+**----+-+ 1 2 4 8 12 16 Threads fio script ========== [global] rw=randwrite norandommap=1 invalidate=0 bs=4k numjobs=16 --> changed this for different thread options time_based=1 ramp_time=30 runtime=60 group_reporting=1 ioengine=psync direct=1 size=16G filename=file1.0.0:file1.0.1:file1.0.2:file1.0.3:file1.0.4:file1.0.5:file1.0.6:file1.0.7:file1.0.8:file1.0.9:file1.0.10:file1.0.11:file1.0.12:file1.0.13:file1.0.14:file1.0.15:file1.0.16:file1.0.17:file1.0.18:file1.0.19:file1.0.20:file1.0.21:file1.0.22:file1.0.23:file1.0.24:file1.0.25:file1.0.26:file1.0.27:file1.0.28:file1.0.29:file1.0.30:file1.0.31 file_service_type=random nrfiles=32 directory=/mnt/ [name] directory=/mnt/ direct=1 NOTE: ====== 1. Looking at ~10x perf delta, I probed a bit deeper to understand what's causing this scalability problem. It seems when we are starting a jbd2 txn then slab alloc code is observing some serious contention around spinlock. I think that the spinlock contention problem in slab alloc path could be optimized on PPC in general, will look into it seperately. But I could still see the perf improvement of close to ~2x on QEMU setup on x86 with simulated pmem device with the patched_kernel v/s vanilla_kernel with same fio workload. perf report from vanilla_kernel (this is not seen with patched kernel) (ppc64) ======================================================================= 47.86% fio [kernel.vmlinux] [k] do_raw_spin_lock | ---do_raw_spin_lock | |--19.43%--_raw_spin_lock | | | --19.31%--0 | | | |--9.77%--deactivate_slab.isra.61 | | ___slab_alloc | | __slab_alloc | | kmem_cache_alloc | | jbd2__journal_start | | __ext4_journal_start_sb <...> 2. This problem was reported by Dan Williams at [1] Links ====== [1]: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-ext4/20190802144304.GP25064@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx/T/ [v2]: https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/8/22/123 Ritesh Harjani (1): ext4: Optimize file overwrites fs/ext4/inode.c | 18 +++++++++++++++--- 1 file changed, 15 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) -- 2.26.2