There are at least 3 advantages to use direct I/O and AIO on
read/write loop's backing file:

1) double cache can be avoided, then memory usage gets
decreased a lot

2) not like user space direct I/O, there isn't cost of
pinning pages

3) avoid context switch for obtaining good throughput
- in buffered file read, random I/O top throughput is often obtained
only if they are submitted concurrently from lots of tasks; but for
sequential I/O, most of times they can be hit from page cache, so
concurrent submissions often introduce unnecessary context switch
and can't improve throughput much. There was such discussion[1]
to use non-blocking I/O to improve the problem for application.
- with direct I/O and AIO, concurrent submissions can be
avoided and random read throughput can't be affected meantime

xfstests(-g auto, ext4) is basically passed when running with
direct I/O(aio), one exception is generic/232, but it failed in
loop buffered I/O(4.2-rc6-next-20150814) too.

Follows the fio test result for performance purpose:
	4 jobs fio test inside ext4 file system over loop block

1) How to run
	- KVM: 4 VCPUs, 2G RAM
	- linux kernel: 4.2-rc6-next-20150814(base) with the patchset
	- the loop block is over one image on SSD.
	- linux psync, 4 jobs, size 1500M, ext4 over loop block
	- test result: IOPS from fio output

2) Throughput(IOPS) becomes a bit better with direct I/O(aio)
        -------------------------------------------------------------
        test cases          |randread   |read   |randwrite  |write  |
        -------------------------------------------------------------
        base                |8015       |113811 |67442      |106978
        -------------------------------------------------------------
        base+loop aio       |8136       |125040 |67811      |111376
        -------------------------------------------------------------

- somehow, it should be caused by more page cache avaiable for
application or one extra page copy is avoided in case of direct I/O

3) context switch
        - context switch decreased by ~50% with loop direct I/O(aio)
	compared with loop buffered I/O(4.2-rc6-next-20150814)

4) memory usage from /proc/meminfo
        -------------------------------------------------------------
                                   | Buffers       | Cached
        -------------------------------------------------------------
        base                       | > 760MB       | ~950MB
        -------------------------------------------------------------
        base+loop direct I/O(aio)  | < 5MB         | ~1.6GB
        -------------------------------------------------------------

- so there are much more page caches available for application with
direct I/O

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/612483/



Signed-off-by: Ming Lei <ming.lei@canonical.com>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>