Re: [f2fs-dev] [PATCH] f2fs: handle decompress only post processing in softirq

[Daeho Jeong]

> Yeah, I heard that you folks are really suffered from the scheduling
> issues. But for my own previous experience, extra memory footprints are
> really critical in Android low memory scenarios (no matter low-ended
> devices or artificial workloads), it tossed me a lot. So I finally
> ntroduced many inplace I/O to handle/minimize that, including inplace
> I/O for compressed pages and temporary pages.
>
> But I'm not quite sure what's currently happening now, since we once
> didn't have such non-deterministic workqueues, and I don't hear from
> other landed vendors.  I think it'd be better to analyse what's going
> on for these kworkers from scheduling POV and why they don't schedule
> in time.
>
> I also have an idea is much like what I'm doing now for sync
> decompression, is that just before lock page and ->read_folio, we can
> trigger some decompression in addition to kworker decompression, but it
> needs some MM modification, as below:
>
>    !PageUptodate(page)
>
>    some callback to decompress in addition to kworker
>
>    lock_page()
>    ->read_folio()
>
> If mm folks don't like it, I think RT thread is also fine after we
> analysed the root cause of the kworker delay I think.
>
> Thanks,
> Gao Xiang
>
> >
> > Thanks,

I don't think this is not a problem with most devices, since the
allocated memory is not too big and it'll be kept just as long as I/O
processing is on. However, I still understand what you're worried
about, so I think I can make a new mount option like "memory=low",
which can be used to give a hint to F2FS to have a priority on as
little memory as possible. In this mode, we will try to keep minimal
memory and we can use the previous implementation for decompression.

Thanks,