[systemd-devel] [PATCH] [RFC][PLEASE TEST] readahead: chunk on spinning media

[Kay Sievers]

On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 12:02 AM, Kok, Auke-jan H
<auke-jan.h.kok at intel.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 3:54 PM, Kay Sievers <kay at vrfy.org> wrote:
>> On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 11:47 PM, Lennart Poettering
>> <lennart at poettering.net> wrote:
>>> On Sat, 23.03.13 23:42, Tom Gundersen (teg at jklm.no) wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 2:16 AM, Lennart Poettering
>>>> <lennart at poettering.net> wrote:
>>>> > Then, I generally believe better than trying to be smart when reading
>>>> > things we should much rather try to place things properly on disk. We
>>>> > already defrag things based on the read order for btrfs, we should do
>>>> > the same for ext4. The API for that unfortunately awful, but e4rat has
>>>> > shown that this does work. Basically, this is what you do:
>>>>
>>>> Isn't the problem that reads by blkid and friends are not being caught
>>>> by readahead-collect, and hence end up blocking until readahead-replay
>>>> has finished? In that case reordering won't help (I think).
>>>
>>> Hmm, if root file system is mounted the file system's superblock should
>>> be cached in memory, I'd expect, so blkid shouldn't have to block...
>>
>> I guess it's more about ~30-40 tiny seek()/read() on the main block
>> device, spread all over the place mainly the first 200 and the last
>> few kilobyte of the disk, what blkid need to do.
>>
>> None of of that shares the cache with the mounted filesystem blocks,
>> and I don't think any of that data is in any other cache at that time.
>
> I don't see anything in udev code setting IOPRIO... perhaps elevating
> the few calls doing bklid and mount might be helpful?

Maybe that really makes a difference, we should definitely try that.
The blkid calls are really limited to a few bytes here and there, and
will never loop for a long time, so that should be fine.

Do you have a box, where you could you give it a quick try to bump the
prio for the libblkid calls:
  ioprio_set(IOPRIO_WHO_PROCESS, getpid(), ...)
in:
  src/udev/udev-builtin-blkid.c
?

Kay