This is backport of the upstream patch 41c73a49df31151f4ff868f28fe4f129f113fa2c. It should be backported to stable kernels because this performance problem was seen on the android 4.4 kernel. commit 41c73a49df31151f4ff868f28fe4f129f113fa2c Author: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@xxxxxxxxxx> Date: Wed Nov 23 17:04:00 2016 -0500 dm bufio: drop the lock when doing GFP_NOIO allocation If the first allocation attempt using GFP_NOWAIT fails, drop the lock and retry using GFP_NOIO allocation (lock is dropped because the allocation can take some time). Note that we won't do GFP_NOIO allocation when we loop for the second time, because the lock shouldn't be dropped between __wait_for_free_buffer and __get_unclaimed_buffer. Signed-off-by: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@xxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@xxxxxxxxxx> diff --git a/drivers/md/dm-bufio.c b/drivers/md/dm-bufio.c index 9ef88f0e2382..1c2e1dd7ca16 100644 --- a/drivers/md/dm-bufio.c +++ b/drivers/md/dm-bufio.c @@ -822,6 +822,7 @@ enum new_flag { static struct dm_buffer *__alloc_buffer_wait_no_callback(struct dm_bufio_client *c, enum new_flag nf) { struct dm_buffer *b; + bool tried_noio_alloc = false; /* * dm-bufio is resistant to allocation failures (it just keeps @@ -846,6 +847,15 @@ static struct dm_buffer *__alloc_buffer_wait_no_callback(struct dm_bufio_client if (nf == NF_PREFETCH) return NULL; + if (dm_bufio_cache_size_latch != 1 && !tried_noio_alloc) { + dm_bufio_unlock(c); + b = alloc_buffer(c, GFP_NOIO | __GFP_NORETRY | __GFP_NOMEMALLOC | __GFP_NOWARN); + dm_bufio_lock(c); + if (b) + return b; + tried_noio_alloc = true; + } + if (!list_empty(&c->reserved_buffers)) { b = list_entry(c->reserved_buffers.next, struct dm_buffer, lru_list);