RAID1: avoid unnecessary spin locks in I/O barrier code
When I run a parallel reading performan testing on a md raid1 device with
two NVMe SSDs, I observe very bad throughput in supprise: by fio with 64KB
block size, 40 seq read I/O jobs, 128 iodepth, overall throughput is
only 2.7GB/s, this is around 50% of the idea performance number.
The perf reports locking contention happens at allow_barrier() and
wait_barrier() code,
- 41.41% fio [kernel.kallsyms] [k] _raw_spin_lock_irqsave
- _raw_spin_lock_irqsave
+ 89.92% allow_barrier
+ 9.34% __wake_up
- 37.30% fio [kernel.kallsyms] [k] _raw_spin_lock_irq
- _raw_spin_lock_irq
- 100.00% wait_barrier
The reason is, in these I/O barrier related functions,
- raise_barrier()
- lower_barrier()
- wait_barrier()
- allow_barrier()
They always hold conf->resync_lock firstly, even there are only regular
reading I/Os and no resync I/O at all. This is a huge performance penalty.
The solution is a lockless-like algorithm in I/O barrier code, and only
holding conf->resync_lock when it has to.
The original idea is from Hannes Reinecke, and Neil Brown provides
comments to improve it. I continue to work on it, and make the patch into
current form.
In the new simpler raid1 I/O barrier implementation, there are two
wait barrier functions,
- wait_barrier()
Which calls _wait_barrier(), is used for regular write I/O. If there is
resync I/O happening on the same I/O barrier bucket, or the whole
array is frozen, task will wait until no barrier on same barrier bucket,
or the whold array is unfreezed.
- wait_read_barrier()
Since regular read I/O won't interfere with resync I/O (read_balance()
will make sure only uptodate data will be read out), it is unnecessary
to wait for barrier in regular read I/Os, waiting in only necessary
when the whole array is frozen.
The operations on conf->nr_pending[idx], conf->nr_waiting[idx], conf->
barrier[idx] are very carefully designed in raise_barrier(),
lower_barrier(), _wait_barrier() and wait_read_barrier(), in order to
avoid unnecessary spin locks in these functions. Once conf->
nr_pengding[idx] is increased, a resync I/O with same barrier bucket index
has to wait in raise_barrier(). Then in _wait_barrier() if no barrier
raised in same barrier bucket index and array is not frozen, the regular
I/O doesn't need to hold conf->resync_lock, it can just increase
conf->nr_pending[idx], and return to its caller. wait_read_barrier() is
very similar to _wait_barrier(), the only difference is it only waits when
array is frozen. For heavy parallel reading I/Os, the lockless I/O barrier
code almostly gets rid of all spin lock cost.
This patch significantly improves raid1 reading peroformance. From my
testing, a raid1 device built by two NVMe SSD, runs fio with 64KB
blocksize, 40 seq read I/O jobs, 128 iodepth, overall throughput
increases from 2.7GB/s to 4.6GB/s (+70%).
Changelog
V4:
- Change conf->nr_queued[] to atomic_t.
- Define BARRIER_BUCKETS_NR_BITS by (PAGE_SHIFT - ilog2(sizeof(atomic_t)))
V3:
- Add smp_mb__after_atomic() as Shaohua and Neil suggested.
- Change conf->nr_queued[] from atomic_t to int.
- Change conf->array_frozen from atomic_t back to int, and use
READ_ONCE(conf->array_frozen) to check value of conf->array_frozen
in _wait_barrier() and wait_read_barrier().
- In _wait_barrier() and wait_read_barrier(), add a call to
wake_up(&conf->wait_barrier) after atomic_dec(&conf->nr_pending[idx]),
to fix a deadlock between _wait_barrier()/wait_read_barrier and
freeze_array().
V2:
- Remove a spin_lock/unlock pair in raid1d().
- Add more code comments to explain why there is no racy when checking two
atomic_t variables at same time.
V1:
- Original RFC patch for comments.
Signed-off-by: 
Coly Li <colyli@suse.de>
Cc: Shaohua Li <shli@fb.com>
Cc: Hannes Reinecke <hare@suse.com>
Cc: Johannes Thumshirn <jthumshirn@suse.de>
Cc: Guoqing Jiang <gqjiang@suse.com>
Reviewed-by: 
Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: 
Shaohua Li <shli@fb.com>
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