There are at least 3 advantages to use direct I/O and AIO on
read/write loop's backing file:
1) double cache can be avoided, then memory usage gets
decreased a lot
2) not like user space direct I/O, there isn't cost of
pinning pages
3) avoid context switch for obtaining good throughput
- in buffered file read, random I/O top throughput is often obtained
only if they are submitted concurrently from lots of tasks; but for
sequential I/O, most of times they can be hit from page cache, so
concurrent submissions often introduce unnecessary context switch
and can't improve throughput much. There was such discussion[1]
to use non-blocking I/O to improve the problem for application.
- with direct I/O and AIO, concurrent submissions can be
avoided and random read throughput can't be affected meantime
xfstests(-g auto, ext4) is basically passed when running with
direct I/O(aio), one exception is generic/232, but it failed in
loop buffered I/O(4.2-rc6-next-20150814) too.
Follows the fio test result for performance purpose:
4 jobs fio test inside ext4 file system over loop block
1) How to run
- KVM: 4 VCPUs, 2G RAM
- linux kernel: 4.2-rc6-next-20150814(base) with the patchset
- the loop block is over one image on SSD.
- linux psync, 4 jobs, size 1500M, ext4 over loop block
- test result: IOPS from fio output
2) Throughput(IOPS) becomes a bit better with direct I/O(aio)
-------------------------------------------------------------
test cases |randread |read |randwrite |write |
-------------------------------------------------------------
base |8015 |113811 |67442 |106978
-------------------------------------------------------------
base+loop aio |8136 |125040 |67811 |111376
-------------------------------------------------------------
- somehow, it should be caused by more page cache avaiable for
application or one extra page copy is avoided in case of direct I/O
3) context switch
- context switch decreased by ~50% with loop direct I/O(aio)
compared with loop buffered I/O(4.2-rc6-next-20150814)
4) memory usage from /proc/meminfo
-------------------------------------------------------------
| Buffers | Cached
-------------------------------------------------------------
base | > 760MB | ~950MB
-------------------------------------------------------------
base+loop direct I/O(aio) | < 5MB | ~1.6GB
-------------------------------------------------------------
- so there are much more page caches available for application with
direct I/O
[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/612483/
Signed-off-by: Ming Lei <ming.lei@canonical.com>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
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