• Coly Li's avatar
    bcache: use (REQ_META|REQ_PRIO) to indicate bio for metadata · dc7292a5
    Coly Li authored
    In 'commit 752f66a7 ("bcache: use REQ_PRIO to indicate bio for
    metadata")' REQ_META is replaced by REQ_PRIO to indicate metadata bio.
    This assumption is not always correct, e.g. XFS uses REQ_META to mark
    metadata bio other than REQ_PRIO. This is why Nix noticed that bcache
    does not cache metadata for XFS after the above commit.
    
    Thanks to Dave Chinner, he explains the difference between REQ_META and
    REQ_PRIO from view of file system developer. Here I quote part of his
    explanation from mailing list,
       REQ_META is used for metadata. REQ_PRIO is used to communicate to
       the lower layers that the submitter considers this IO to be more
       important that non REQ_PRIO IO and so dispatch should be expedited.
    
       IOWs, if the filesystem considers metadata IO to be more important
       that user data IO, then it will use REQ_PRIO | REQ_META rather than
       just REQ_META.
    
    Then it seems bios with REQ_META or REQ_PRIO should both be cached for
    performance optimation, because they are all probably low I/O latency
    demand by upper layer (e.g. file system).
    
    So in this patch, when we want to decide whether to bypass the cache,
    REQ_META and REQ_PRIO are both checked. Then both metadata and
    high priority I/O requests will be handled properly.
    Reported-by: default avatarNix <nix@esperi.org.uk>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarColy Li <colyli@suse.de>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarAndre Noll <maan@tuebingen.mpg.de>
    Tested-by: default avatarNix <nix@esperi.org.uk>
    Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
    Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
    Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
    dc7292a5
request.c 34.7 KB