Jens Axboe wrote:
On Thu, May 31 2007, Bill Davidsen wrote:Jens Axboe wrote:Wait. Do filesystems expect (depend on) anything but ordering now? Does md? Having users of barriers as they currently behave suddenly getting SYNC behavior where they expect ORDERED is likely to have a negative effect on performance. Or do I misread what is actually guaranteed by WRITE_BARRIER now, and a flush is currently happening in all cases?On Thu, May 31 2007, David Chinner wrote:On Thu, May 31, 2007 at 08:26:45AM +0200, Jens Axboe wrote:On Thu, May 31 2007, David Chinner wrote:IOWs, there are two parts to the problem: 1 - guaranteeing I/O ordering 2 - guaranteeing blocks are on persistent storage. Right now, a single barrier I/O is used to provide both of these guarantees. In most cases, all we really need to provide is 1); the need for 2) is a much rarer condition but still needs to be provided.if I am understanding it correctly, the big win for barriers is that you do NOT have to stop and wait until the data is on persistant media before you can continue.Yes, if we define a barrier to only guarantee 1), then yes this would be a big win (esp. for XFS). But that requires all filesystems to handle sync writes differently, and sync_blockdev() needs to call blkdev_issue_flush() as well.... So, what do we do here? Do we define a barrier I/O to only provide ordering, or do we define it to also provide persistent storage writeback? Whatever we decide, it needs to be documented....The block layer already has a notion of the two types of barriers, with a very small amount of tweaking we could expose that. There's absolutely zero reason we can't easily support both types of barriers.That sounds like a good idea - we can leave the existing WRITE_BARRIER behaviour unchanged and introduce a new WRITE_ORDERED behaviour that only guarantees ordering. The filesystem can then choose which to use where appropriate....Precisely. The current definition of barriers are what Chris and I came up with many years ago, when solving the problem for reiserfs originally. It is by no means the only feasible approach. I'll add a WRITE_ORDERED command to the #barrier branch, it already contains the empty-bio barrier support I posted yesterday (well a slightly modified and cleaned up version).See the above stuff you quote, it's answered there. It's not a change, this is how the Linux barrier write has always worked since I first implemented it. What David and I are talking about is adding a more relaxed version as well, that just implies ordering.
I was reading the documentation in block/biodoc.txt, which seems to just say ordered:
1.2.1 I/O Barriers There is a way to enforce strict ordering for i/os through barriers. All requests before a barrier point must be serviced before the barrier request and any other requests arriving after the barrier will not be serviced until after the barrier has completed. This is useful for higher level control on write ordering, e.g flushing a log of committed updates to disk before the corresponding updates themselves. A flag in the bio structure, BIO_BARRIER is used to identify a barrier i/o. The generic i/o scheduler would make sure that it places the barrier request and all other requests coming after it after all the previous requests in the queue. Barriers may be implemented in different ways depending on the driver. A SCSI driver for example could make use of ordered tags to preserve the necessary ordering with a lower impact on throughput. For IDE this might be two sync cache flush: a pre and post flush when encountering a barrier write.The "flush" comment is associated with IDE, so it wasn't clear that the device cache is always cleared to force the data to the platter.
And will this also be available to user space f/s, since I just proposed a project which uses one? :-(I see several uses for that, so I'd hope so.I think the goal is good, more choice is almost always better choice, I just want to be sure there won't be big disk performance regressions.We can't get more heavy weight than the current barrier, it's about as conservative as you can get.
-- bill davidsen <davidsen tmr com> CTO TMR Associates, Inc Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979