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  • Hisashi Hifumi's avatar
    readahead: add blk_run_backing_dev · 65a80b4c
    Hisashi Hifumi authored
    I added blk_run_backing_dev on page_cache_async_readahead so readahead I/O
    is unpluged to improve throughput on especially RAID environment.
    
    The normal case is, if page N become uptodate at time T(N), then T(N) <=
    T(N+1) holds.  With RAID (and NFS to some degree), there is no strict
    ordering, the data arrival time depends on runtime status of individual
    disks, which breaks that formula.  So in do_generic_file_read(), just
    after submitting the async readahead IO request, the current page may well
    be uptodate, so the page won't be locked, and the block device won't be
    implicitly unplugged:
    
                   if (PageReadahead(page))
                            page_cache_async_readahead()
                    if (!PageUptodate(page))
                                    goto page_not_up_to_date;
                    //...
    page_not_up_to_date:
                    lock_page_killable(page);
    
    Therefore explicit unplugging can help.
    
    Following is the test result with dd.
    
    #dd if=testdir/testfile of=/dev/null bs=16384
    
    -2.6.30-rc6
    1048576+0 records in
    1048576+0 records out
    17179869184 bytes (17 GB) copied, 224.182 seconds, 76.6 MB/s
    
    -2.6.30-rc6-patched
    1048576+0 records in
    1048576+0 records out
    17179869184 bytes (17 GB) copied, 206.465 seconds, 83.2 MB/s
    
    (7Disks RAID-0 Array)
    
    -2.6.30-rc6
    1054976+0 records in
    1054976+0 records out
    17284726784 bytes (17 GB) copied, 212.233 seconds, 81.4 MB/s
    
    -2.6.30-rc6-patched
    1054976+0 records out
    17284726784 bytes (17 GB) copied, 198.878 seconds, 86.9 MB/s
    
    (7Disks RAID-5 Array)
    
    The patch was found to improve performance with the SCST scsi target
    driver.  See
    http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=a0272b440906030714g67eabc5k8f847fb1e538cc62%40mail.gmail.com&forum_name=scst-devel
    
    
    
    [akpm@linux-foundation.org: unbust comment layout]
    [akpm@linux-foundation.org: "fix" CONFIG_BLOCK=n]
    Signed-off-by: default avatarHisashi Hifumi <hifumi.hisashi@oss.ntt.co.jp>
    Acked-by: default avatarWu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
    Cc: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
    Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
    Tested-by: default avatarRonald <intercommit@gmail.com>
    Cc: Bart Van Assche <bart.vanassche@gmail.com>
    Cc: Vladislav Bolkhovitin <vst@vlnb.net>
    Cc: Randy Dunlap <randy.dunlap@oracle.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    65a80b4c