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Only commit the ZIL once in zpl_writepages() (msync() case).

Description

Only commit the ZIL once in zpl_writepages() (msync() case).

Currently, using msync() results in the following code path:

sys_msync -> zpl_fsync -> filemap_write_and_wait_range -> zpl_writepages -> write_cache_pages -> zpl_putpage

In such a code path, zil_commit() is called as part of zpl_putpage().
This means that for each page, the write is handed to the DMU, the ZIL
is committed, and only then do we move on to the next page. As one might
imagine, this results in atrocious performance where there is a large
number of pages to write: instead of committing a batch of N writes,
we do N commits containing one page each. In some extreme cases this
can result in msync() being ~700 times slower than it should be, as well
as very inefficient use of ZIL resources.

This patch fixes this issue by making sure that the requested writes
are batched and then committed only once. Unfortunately, the
implementation is somewhat non-trivial because there is no way to run
write_cache_pages in SYNC mode (so that we get all pages) without
making it wait on the writeback tag for each page.

The solution implemented here is composed of two parts:

  • I added a new callback system to the ZIL, which allows the caller to be notified when its ITX gets written to stable storage. One nice thing is that the callback is called not only in zil_commit() but in zil_sync() as well, which means that the caller doesn't have to care whether the write ended up in the ZIL or the DMU: it will get notified as soon as it's safe, period. This is an improvement over dmu_tx_callback_register() that was used previously, which only supports DMU writes. The rationale for this change is to allow zpl_putpage() to be notified when a ZIL commit is completed without having to block on zil_commit() itself.
  • zpl_writepages() now calls write_cache_pages in non-SYNC mode, which will prevent (1) write_cache_pages from blocking, and (2) zpl_putpage from issuing ZIL commits. zpl_writepages() will issue the commit itself instead of relying on zpl_putpage() to do it, thus nicely batching the writes. Note, however, that we still have to call write_cache_pages() again in SYNC mode because there is an edge case documented in the implementation of write_cache_pages() whereas it will not give us all dirty pages when running in non-SYNC mode. Thus we need to run it at least once in SYNC mode to make sure we honor persistency guarantees. This only happens when the pages are modified at the same time msync() is running, which should be rare. In most cases there won't be any additional pages and this second call will do nothing.

Note that this change also fixes a bug related to #907 whereas calling
msync() on pages that were already handed over to the DMU in a previous
writepages() call would make msync() block until the next TXG sync
instead of returning as soon as the ZIL commit is complete. The new
callback system fixes that problem.

Signed-off-by: Richard Yao <ryao@gentoo.org>
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
Closes #1849
Closes #907

Details

Provenance
Etienne Dechamps <etienne@edechamps.fr>Authored on Nov 10 2013, 3:00 PM
Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>Committed on Nov 23 2013, 11:08 PM
Parents
rG14cecbb159a4: Change zfs-dkms requirement
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