Re: Performance testing of various barrier reduction patches [was:Re: [RFC v4] ext4: Coordinate fsync requests]

[Darrick J. Wong]

On Sat, Oct 16, 2010 at 01:40:41AM +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 04:39:04PM -0700, Darrick J. Wong wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 04:14:55PM +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > > I still think adding code to every filesystem to optimize for a rather
> > > stupid use case is not a good idea.  I dropped out a bit from the
> > > thread in the middle, but what was the real use case for lots of
> > > concurrent fsyncs on the same inode again?
> > 
> > The use case I'm looking at is concurrent fsyncs on /different/ inodes,
> > actually.  We have _n_ different processes, each writing (and fsyncing) its own
> > separate file on the same filesystem.
> > 
> > iirc, ext4_sync_file is called with the inode mutex held, which prevents
> > concurrent fsyncs on the same inode.
> 
> Indeed.  Although we could drop it at least for the cache flush
> call.  We already do this for block devices.

<nod>

Unfortunately, the patch immediately triggers the BUG at
drivers/scsi/scsi_lib.c:1064:
 /*
  * BLOCK_PC requests may transfer data, in which case they must
  * a bio attached to them.  Or they might contain a SCSI command
  * that does not transfer data, in which case they may optionally
  * submit a request without an attached bio.
  */
 if (req->bio) {
         int ret;

         BUG_ON(!req->nr_phys_segments);

--D
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