Re: [PATCH 03/33] mm: Implement readahead_control pageset expansion

[Mike Marshall]

I plan to try and use readahead_expand in Orangefs...

-Mike

On Tue, Feb 16, 2021 at 8:28 AM Matthew Wilcox <willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Feb 16, 2021 at 11:32:15AM +0100, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > On Mon, Feb 15, 2021 at 03:44:52PM +0000, David Howells wrote:
> > > Provide a function, readahead_expand(), that expands the set of pages
> > > specified by a readahead_control object to encompass a revised area with a
> > > proposed size and length.
> > >
> > > The proposed area must include all of the old area and may be expanded yet
> > > more by this function so that the edges align on (transparent huge) page
> > > boundaries as allocated.
> > >
> > > The expansion will be cut short if a page already exists in either of the
> > > areas being expanded into.  Note that any expansion made in such a case is
> > > not rolled back.
> > >
> > > This will be used by fscache so that reads can be expanded to cache granule
> > > boundaries, thereby allowing whole granules to be stored in the cache, but
> > > there are other potential users also.
> >
> > So looking at linux-next this seems to have a user, but that user is
> > dead wood given that nothing implements ->expand_readahead.
> >
> > Looking at the code structure I think netfs_readahead and
> > netfs_rreq_expand is a complete mess and needs to be turned upside
> > down, that is instead of calling back from netfs_readahead to the
> > calling file system, split it into a few helpers called by the
> > caller.
>
> That's funny, we modelled it after iomap.
>
> > But even after this can't we just expose the cache granule boundary
> > to the VM so that the read-ahead request gets setup correctly from
> > the very beginning?
>
> The intent is that this be usable by filesystems which want to (for
> example) compress variable sized blocks.  So they won't know which pages
> they want to readahead until they're in their iomap actor routine,
> see that the extent they're in is compressed, and find out how large
> the extent is.