Re: [RFC] Bypass filesystems for reading cached pages

From: Andreas Gruenbacher
Date: Wed Jun 24 2020 - 08:36:01 EST


On Mon, Jun 22, 2020 at 8:13 PM Matthew Wilcox <willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 22, 2020 at 04:35:05PM +0200, Andreas Gruenbacher wrote:
> > I'm fine with not moving that functionality into the VFS. The problem
> > I have in gfs2 is that taking glocks is really expensive. Part of that
> > overhead is accidental, but we definitely won't be able to fix it in
> > the short term. So something like the IOCB_CACHED flag that prevents
> > generic_file_read_iter from issuing readahead I/O would save the day
> > for us. Does that idea stand a chance?
>
> For the short-term fix, is switching to a trylock in gfs2_readahead()
> acceptable?

Well, it's the only thing we can do for now, right?

> diff --git a/fs/gfs2/aops.c b/fs/gfs2/aops.c
> index 72c9560f4467..6ccd478c81ff 100644
> --- a/fs/gfs2/aops.c
> +++ b/fs/gfs2/aops.c
> @@ -600,7 +600,7 @@ static void gfs2_readahead(struct readahead_control *rac)
> struct gfs2_inode *ip = GFS2_I(inode);
> struct gfs2_holder gh;
>
> - gfs2_holder_init(ip->i_gl, LM_ST_SHARED, 0, &gh);
> + gfs2_holder_init(ip->i_gl, LM_ST_SHARED, LM_FLAG_TRY, &gh);
> if (gfs2_glock_nq(&gh))
> goto out_uninit;
> if (!gfs2_is_stuffed(ip))

Thanks,
Andreas