[PATCH 0/3] dm-verity: optionally use tasklets in dm-verity

From: Nathan Huckleberry
Date: Fri Jul 22 2022 - 05:44:50 EST


Using tasklets for disk verification can reduce IO latency. When there are
accelerated hash instructions it is often better to compute the hash immediately
using a tasklet rather than deferring verification to a work-queue. This
reduces time spent waiting to schedule work-queue jobs, but requires spending
slightly more time in interrupt context.

A tasklet can only be used for verification if all the required hashes are
already in the dm-bufio cache. If verification cannot be done in a tasklet, we
fallback the existing work-queue implementation.

To allow tasklets to query the dm-bufio cache, the dm-bufio code must not sleep.
This patchset adds a flag to dm-bufio that disallows sleeping.

The following shows a speed comparison of random reads on a dm-verity device.
The dm-verity device uses a 1G ramdisk for data and a 1G ramdisk for hashes.
One test was run using tasklets and one test was run using the existing
work-queue solution. Both tests were run when the dm-bufio cache was hot. The
tasklet implementation performs significantly better since there is no time
waiting for work-queue jobs to be scheduled.

# /data/fio /data/tasklet.fio | grep READ
READ: bw=181MiB/s (190MB/s), 181MiB/s-181MiB/s (190MB/s-190MB/s), io=512MiB
(537MB), run=2827-2827msec
# /data/fio /data/workqueue.fio | grep READ
READ: bw=23.6MiB/s (24.8MB/s), 23.6MiB/s-23.6MiB/s (24.8MB/s-24.8MB/s),
io=512MiB (537MB), run=21688-21688msec

Nathan Huckleberry (3):
dm-bufio: Add flags for dm_bufio_client_create
dm-bufio: Add DM_BUFIO_GET_CANT_SLEEP
dm-verity: Add try_verify_in_tasklet

drivers/md/dm-bufio.c | 29 +++++--
drivers/md/dm-ebs-target.c | 3 +-
drivers/md/dm-integrity.c | 2 +-
drivers/md/dm-snap-persistent.c | 2 +-
drivers/md/dm-verity-fec.c | 4 +-
drivers/md/dm-verity-target.c | 87 ++++++++++++++++---
drivers/md/dm-verity.h | 5 ++
drivers/md/persistent-data/dm-block-manager.c | 3 +-
include/linux/dm-bufio.h | 8 +-
9 files changed, 119 insertions(+), 24 deletions(-)

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2.37.1.359.gd136c6c3e2-goog