[PATCH] Avoid always dirtying mapping->flags on O_DIRECT

[Jens Axboe]

Hi,

In some testing I ran today, we end up spending 40% of the time in
filemap_check_errors(). That smells fishy. Looking further, this is
basically what happens:

blkdev_aio_read()
    generic_file_aio_read()
        filemap_write_and_wait_range()
            if (!mapping->nr_pages)
                filemap_check_errors()

and filemap_check_errors() always attempts two test_and_clear_bit() on
the mapping flags, thus dirtying it for every single invocation. The
patch below tests each of these bits before clearing them, avoiding this
issue. In my test case (4-socket box), performance went from 1.7M IOPS
to 4.0M IOPS.

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@xxxxxx>

diff --git a/mm/filemap.c b/mm/filemap.c
index 000a220..088358c 100644
--- a/mm/filemap.c
+++ b/mm/filemap.c
@@ -257,9 +257,11 @@ static int filemap_check_errors(struct address_space *mapping)
 {
 	int ret = 0;
 	/* Check for outstanding write errors */
-	if (test_and_clear_bit(AS_ENOSPC, &mapping->flags))
+	if (test_bit(AS_ENOSPC, &mapping->flags) &&
+	    test_and_clear_bit(AS_ENOSPC, &mapping->flags))
 		ret = -ENOSPC;
-	if (test_and_clear_bit(AS_EIO, &mapping->flags))
+	if (test_bit(AS_EIO, &mapping->flags) &&
+	    test_and_clear_bit(AS_EIO, &mapping->flags))
 		ret = -EIO;
 	return ret;
 }


-- 
Jens Axboe

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