When array is degraded, read data landed on failed drives will result in
reading rest of data in a stripe. So a single sequential read would
result in same data being read twice.

This patch is to avoid chunk aligned read for degraded array. The
downside is to involve stripe cache which means associated CPU overhead
and extra memory copy.

Test Results:
Following test are done on a enterprise storage node with Seagate 6T SAS
drives and Xeon E5-2648L CPU (10 cores, 1.9Ghz), 10 disks MD RAID6 8+2,
chunk size 128 KiB.

I use FIO, using direct-io with various bs size, enough queue depth,
tested sequential and 100% random read against 3 array config:
 1) optimal, as baseline;
 2) degraded;
 3) degraded with this patch.
Kernel version is 4.0-rc3.

Each individual test I only did once so there might be some variations,
but we just focus on big trend.

Sequential Read:
  bs=(KiB)  optimal(MiB/s)  degraded(MiB/s)  degraded-with-patch (MiB/s)
   1024       1608            656              995
    512       1624            710              956
    256       1635            728              980
    128       1636            771              983
     64       1612           1119             1000
     32       1580           1420             1004
     16       1368            688              986
      8        768            647              953
      4        411            413              850

Random Read:
  bs=(KiB)  optimal(IOPS)  degraded(IOPS)  degraded-with-patch (IOPS)
   1024        163            160              156
    512        274            273              272
    256        426            428              424
    128        576            592              591
     64        726            724              726
     32        849            848              837
     16        900            970              971
      8        927            940              929
      4        948            940              955

Some notes:
  * In sequential + optimal, as bs size getting smaller, the FIO thread
become CPU bound.
  * In sequential + degraded, there's big increase when bs is 64K and
32K, I don't have explanation.
  * In sequential + degraded-with-patch, the MD thread mostly become CPU
bound.

If you want to we can discuss specific data point in those data. But in
general it seems with this patch, we have more predictable and in most
cases significant better sequential read performance when array is
degraded, and almost no noticeable impact on random read.

Performance is a complicated thing, the patch works well for this
particular configuration, but may not be universal. For example I
imagine testing on all SSD array may have very different result. But I
personally think in most cases IO bandwidth is more scarce resource than
CPU.
Signed-off-by: Eric Mei <eric.mei@seagate.com>
Signed-off-by: NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de>