From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1031048Ab3HIUeY (ORCPT ); Fri, 9 Aug 2013 16:34:24 -0400 Received: from cantor2.suse.de ([195.135.220.15]:46195 "EHLO mx2.suse.de" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1030904Ab3HIUeX (ORCPT ); Fri, 9 Aug 2013 16:34:23 -0400 Date: Fri, 9 Aug 2013 22:34:20 +0200 From: Jan Kara To: Andy Lutomirski Cc: Dave Hansen , linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [RFC 0/3] Add madvise(..., MADV_WILLWRITE) Message-ID: <20130809203420.GA1050@quack.suse.cz> References: <20130807134058.GC12843@quack.suse.cz> <520286A4.1020101@intel.com> <20130808101807.GB4325@quack.suse.cz> <20130808185340.GA13926@quack.suse.cz> <5204229F.8000507@intel.com> <20130809075523.GA14574@quack.suse.cz> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Fri 09-08-13 10:36:41, Andy Lutomirski wrote: > On Fri, Aug 9, 2013 at 12:55 AM, Jan Kara wrote: > > On Thu 08-08-13 15:58:39, Dave Hansen wrote: > >> I was coincidentally tracking down what I thought was a scalability > >> problem (turned out to be full disks :). I noticed, though, that ext4 > >> is about 20% slower than ext2/3 at doing write page faults (x-axis is > >> number of tasks): > >> > >> http://www.sr71.net/~dave/intel/page-fault-exts/cmp.html?1=ext3&2=ext4&hide=linear,threads,threads_idle,processes_idle&rollPeriod=5 > >> > >> The test case is: > >> > >> https://github.com/antonblanchard/will-it-scale/blob/master/tests/page_fault3.c > > The reason is that ext2/ext3 do almost nothing in their write fault > > handler - they are about as fast as it can get. ext4 OTOH needs to reserve > > blocks for delayed allocation, setup buffers under a page etc. This is > > necessary if you want to make sure that if data are written via mmap, they > > also have space available on disk to be written to (ext2 / ext3 do not care > > and will just drop the data on the floor if you happen to hit ENOSPC during > > writeback). > > Out of curiosity, why does ext4 need to set up buffers? That is, as > long as the fs can guarantee that there is reserved space to write out > the page, why isn't it sufficient to just mark the page dirty and let > the writeback code set up the buffers? Well, because we track the fact that the space is reserved in the buffer itself. Honza -- Jan Kara SUSE Labs, CR