Currently, the `zvol_threads` variable, which controls the number of worker
threads which process items from the ZVOL queues, is set to the number of
available CPUs.
This choice seems to be based on the assumption that ZVOL threads are
CPU-bound. This is not necessarily true, especially for synchronous writes.
Consider the situation described in the comments for `zil_commit()`, which is
called inside `zvol_write()` for synchronous writes:
> itxs are committed in batches. In a heavily stressed zil there will be a
> commit writer thread who is writing out a bunch of itxs to the log for a
> set of committing threads (cthreads) in the same batch as the writer.
> Those cthreads are all waiting on the same cv for that batch.
>
> There will also be a different and growing batch of threads that are
> waiting to commit (qthreads). When the committing batch completes a
> transition occurs such that the cthreads exit and the qthreads become
> cthreads. One of the new cthreads becomes he writer thread for the batch.
> Any new threads arriving become new qthreads.
We can easily deduce that, in the case of ZVOLs, there can be a maximum of
`zvol_threads` cthreads and qthreads. The default value for `zvol_threads` is
typically between 1 and 8, which is way too low in this case. This means
there will be a lot of small commits to the ZIL, which is very inefficient
compared to a few big commits, especially since we have to wait for the data
to be on stable storage. Increasing the number of threads will increase the
amount of data waiting to be commited and thus the size of the individual
commits.
On my system, in the context of VM disk image storage (lots of small
synchronous writes), increasing `zvol_threads` from 8 to 32 results in a 50%
increase in sequential synchronous write performance.
We should choose a more sensible default for `zvol_threads`. Unfortunately
the optimal value is difficult to determine automatically, since it depends
on the synchronous write latency of the underlying storage devices. In any
case, a hardcoded value of 32 would probably be better than the current
situation. Having a lot of ZVOL threads doesn't seem to have any real
downside anyway.
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
Fixes#392
The Linux block device queue subsystem exposes a number of configurable
settings described in Linux block/blk-settings.c. The defaults for these
settings are tuned for hard drives, and are not optimized for ZVOLs. Proper
configuration of these options would allow upper layers (I/O scheduler) to
take better decisions about write merging and ordering.
Detailed rationale:
- max_hw_sectors is set to unlimited (UINT_MAX). zvol_write() is able to
handle writes of any size, so there's no reason to impose a limit. Let the
upper layer decide.
- max_segments and max_segment_size are set to unlimited. zvol_write() will
copy the requests' contents into a dbuf anyway, so the number and size of
the segments are irrelevant. Let the upper layer decide.
- physical_block_size and io_opt are set to the ZVOL's block size. This
has the potential to somewhat alleviate issue #361 for ZVOLs, by warning
the upper layers that writes smaller than the volume's block size will be
slow.
- The NONROT flag is set to indicate this isn't a rotational device.
Although the backing zpool might be composed of rotational devices, the
resulting ZVOL often doesn't exhibit the same behavior due to the COW
mechanisms used by ZFS. Setting this flag will prevent upper layers from
making useless decisions (such as reordering writes) based on incorrect
assumptions about the behavior of the ZVOL.
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
zvol_write() assumes that the write request must be written to stable storage
if rq_is_sync() is true. Unfortunately, this assumption is incorrect. Indeed,
"sync" does *not* mean what we think it means in the context of the Linux
block layer. This is well explained in linux/fs.h:
WRITE: A normal async write. Device will be plugged.
WRITE_SYNC: Synchronous write. Identical to WRITE, but passes down
the hint that someone will be waiting on this IO
shortly.
WRITE_FLUSH: Like WRITE_SYNC but with preceding cache flush.
WRITE_FUA: Like WRITE_SYNC but data is guaranteed to be on
non-volatile media on completion.
In other words, SYNC does not *mean* that the write must be on stable storage
on completion. It just means that someone is waiting on us to complete the
write request. Thus triggering a ZIL commit for each SYNC write request on a
ZVOL is unnecessary and harmful for performance. To make matters worse, ZVOL
users have no way to express that they actually want data to be written to
stable storage, which means the ZIL is broken for ZVOLs.
The request for stable storage is expressed by the FUA flag, so we must
commit the ZIL after the write if the FUA flag is set. In addition, we must
commit the ZIL before the write if the FLUSH flag is set.
Also, we must inform the block layer that we actually support FLUSH and FUA.
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
Currently the "sync=always" property works for regular ZFS datasets, but not
for ZVOLs. This patch remedies that.
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
Fixes#374.
The zvol_major and zvol_threads module options were being created
with 0 permission bits. This prevented them from being listed in
the /sys/module/zfs/parameters/ directory, although they were
visible in `modinfo zfs`. This patch fixes the issue by updating
the permission bits to 0444. For the moment these options must
be read-only because they are used during module initialization.
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
Issue #392
This change fixes a kernel panic which would occur when resizing
a dataset which was not open. The objset_t stored in the
zvol_state_t will be set to NULL when the block device is closed.
To avoid this issue we pass the correct objset_t as the third arg.
The code has also been updated to correctly notify the kernel
when the block device capacity changes. For 2.6.28 and newer
kernels the capacity change will be immediately detected. For
earlier kernels the capacity change will be detected when the
device is next opened. This is a known limitation of older
kernels.
Online ext3 resize test case passes on 2.6.28+ kernels:
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/zvol bs=1M count=1 seek=1023
$ zpool create tank /tmp/zvol
$ zfs create -V 500M tank/zd0
$ mkfs.ext3 /dev/zd0
$ mkdir /mnt/zd0
$ mount /dev/zd0 /mnt/zd0
$ df -h /mnt/zd0
$ zfs set volsize=800M tank/zd0
$ resize2fs /dev/zd0
$ df -h /mnt/zd0
Original-patch-by: Fajar A. Nugraha <github@fajar.net>
Closes#68Closes#84
This commit allows zvols with names longer than 32 characters, which
fixes issue on https://github.com/behlendorf/zfs/issues/#issue/102.
Changes include:
- use /dev/zd* device names for zvol, where * is the device minor
(include/sys/fs/zfs.h, module/zfs/zvol.c).
- add BLKZNAME ioctl to get dataset name from userland
(include/sys/fs/zfs.h, module/zfs/zvol.c, cmd/zvol_id).
- add udev rule to create /dev/zvol/[dataset_name] and the legacy
/dev/[dataset_name] symlink. For partitions on zvol, it will create
/dev/zvol/[dataset_name]-part* (etc/udev/rules.d/60-zvol.rules,
cmd/zvol_id).
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
For legacy reasons the zvol.c and vdev_disk.c Linux compatibility
code ended up in sys/blkdev.h and sys/vdev_disk.h headers. While
there are worse places for this code to live it should be in a
linux/blkdev_compat.h header. This change moves this block device
Linux compatibility code in to the linux/blkdev_compat.h header
and updates all the correct #include locations. This is not a
functional change or bug fix, it is just code cleanup.
It was noticed that when you have zvols in multiple datasets
not all of the zvol devices are created at module load time.
Fajarnugraha did the leg work to identify that the root cause of
this bug is a non-zero return value from zvol_create_minors_cb().
Returning a non-zero value from the dmu_objset_find_spa() callback
function results in aborting processing the remaining children in
a dataset. Since we want to ensure that the callback in run on
all children regardless of error simply unconditionally return
zero from the zvol_create_minors_cb(). This callback function
is solely used for this purpose so surpressing the error is safe.
Closes#96
A new flag is required for the zfs_rlock code to determine if
it is operation of the zvol of zpl dataset. This used to be
keyed off the zp->z_vnode, which was a hack to begin with, but
with the removal of vnodes we needed a dedicated flag.
On some older kernels, i.e. 2.6.18, zvol_ioctl_by_inode() may get passed a NULL
file pointer if the user tries to mount a zvol without a filesystem on it.
This change adds checks to prevent a null pointer dereference.
Closes#73.
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
