Re: [PATCH v6 0/7] vfs: Non-blockling buffered fs read (page cache only)

From: Dave Chinner
Date: Tue Nov 11 2014 - 01:44:27 EST


On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 11:40:23AM -0500, Milosz Tanski wrote:
> This patcheset introduces an ability to perform a non-blocking read from
> regular files in buffered IO mode. This works by only for those filesystems
> that have data in the page cache.
>
> It does this by introducing new syscalls new syscalls preadv2/pwritev2. These
> new syscalls behave like the network sendmsg, recvmsg syscalls that accept an
> extra flag argument (RWF_NONBLOCK).
>
> It's a very common patern today (samba, libuv, etc..) use a large threadpool to
> perform buffered IO operations. They submit the work form another thread
> that performs network IO and epoll or other threads that perform CPU work. This
> leads to increased latency for processing, esp. in the case of data that's
> already cached in the page cache.
>
> With the new interface the applications will now be able to fetch the data in
> their network / cpu bound thread(s) and only defer to a threadpool if it's not
> there. In our own application (VLDB) we've observed a decrease in latency for
> "fast" request by avoiding unnecessary queuing and having to swap out current
> tasks in IO bound work threads.

Can you write a test (or set of) for fstests that exercises this new
functionality? I'm not worried about performance, just
correctness....

Cheers,

Dave.

--
Dave Chinner
david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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