xfs: intent item whiteouts
When we log modifications based on intents, we add both intent and intent done items to the modification being made. These get written to the log to ensure that the operation is re-run if the intent done is not found in the log. However, for operations that complete wholly within a single checkpoint, the change in the checkpoint is atomic and will never need replay. In this case, we don't need to actually write the intent and intent done items to the journal because log recovery will never need to manually restart this modification. Log recovery currently handles intent/intent done matching by inserting the intent into the AIL, then removing it when a matching intent done item is found. Hence for all the intent-based operations that complete within a checkpoint, we spend all that time parsing the intent/intent done items just to cancel them and do nothing with them. Hence it follows that the only time we actually need intents in the log is when the modification crosses checkpoint boundaries in the log and so may only be partially complete in the journal. Hence if we commit and intent done item to the CIL and the intent item is in the same checkpoint, we don't actually have to write them to the journal because log recovery will always cancel the intents. We've never really worried about the overhead of logging intents unnecessarily like this because the intents we log are generally very much smaller than the change being made. e.g. freeing an extent involves modifying at lease two freespace btree blocks and the AGF, so the EFI/EFD overhead is only a small increase in space and processing time compared to the overall cost of freeing an extent. However, delayed attributes change this cost equation dramatically, especially for inline attributes. In the case of adding an inline attribute, we only log the inode core and attribute fork at present. With delayed attributes, we now log the attr intent which includes the name and value, the inode core adn attr fork, and finally the attr intent done item. We increase the number of items we log from 1 to 3, and the number of log vectors (regions) goes up from 3 to 7. Hence we tripple the number of objects that the CIL has to process, and more than double the number of log vectors that need to be written to the journal. At scale, this means delayed attributes cause a non-pipelined CIL to become CPU bound processing all the extra items, resulting in a > 40% performance degradation on 16-way file+xattr create worklaods. Pipelining the CIL (as per 5.15) reduces the performance degradation to 20%, but now the limitation is the rate at which the log items can be written to the iclogs and iclogs be dispatched for IO and completed. Even log IO completion is slowed down by these intents, because it now has to process 3x the number of items in the checkpoint. Processing completed intents is especially inefficient here, because we first insert the intent into the AIL, then remove it from the AIL when the intent done is processed. IOWs, we are also doing expensive operations in log IO completion we could completely avoid if we didn't log completed intent/intent done pairs. Enter log item whiteouts. When an intent done is committed, we can check to see if the associated intent is in the same checkpoint as we are currently committing the intent done to. If so, we can mark the intent log item with a whiteout and immediately free the intent done item rather than committing it to the CIL. We can basically skip the entire formatting and CIL insertion steps for the intent done item. However, we cannot remove the intent item from the CIL at this point because the unlocked per-cpu CIL item lists do not permit removal without holding the CIL context lock exclusively. Transaction commit only holds the context lock shared, hence the best we can do is mark the intent item with a whiteout so that the CIL push can release it rather than writing it to the log. This means we never write the intent to the log if the intent done has also been committed to the same checkpoint, but we'll always write the intent if the intent done has not been committed or has been committed to a different checkpoint. This will result in correct log recovery behaviour in all cases, without the overhead of logging unnecessary intents. This intent whiteout concept is generic - we can apply it to all intent/intent done pairs that have a direct 1:1 relationship. The way deferred ops iterate and relog intents mean that all intents currently have a 1:1 relationship with their done intent, and hence we can apply this cancellation to all existing intent/intent done implementations. For delayed attributes with a 16-way 64kB xattr create workload, whiteouts reduce the amount of journalled metadata from ~2.5GB/s down to ~600MB/s and improve the creation rate from 9000/s to 14000/s. Signed-off-by:Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com> Reviewed-by:
Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de> Reviewed-by:
Darrick J. Wong <djwong@kernel.org> Reviewed-by:
Allison Henderson <allison.henderson@oracle.com> Signed-off-by:
Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
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