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>
The second argument of sops->show_options() was changed from a
'struct vfsmount *' to a 'struct dentry *'. Add an autoconf check
to detect the API change and then conditionally define the expected
interface. In either case we are only interested in the zfs_sb_t.
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
Closes#549
These libraries, which are an artifact of the ZoL development
process, conflict with packages that are already in distribution:
* libspl: SPL Programming Language
* libavl: AVL for Linux
* libefi: GRUB
And these libraries are potential conflicts:
* libshare: the Linux Mount Manager
* libunicode: Perl and Python
Recompose these five ZoL components into the four libraries that are
conventionally provided by Solaris and FreeBSD systems:
+ libnvpair
+ libuutil
+ libzpool
+ libzfs
This change resolves the name conflict, makes ZoL more compatible
with existing software that uses autotools to detect ZFS, and allows
pkg-zfs to better reflect the official Debian kFreeBSD packaging.
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
Closes: #430
The Linux 3.1 kernel has introduced the concept of per-filesystem
shrinkers which are directly assoicated with a super block. Prior
to this change there was one shared global shrinker.
The zfs code relied on being able to call the global shrinker when
the arc_meta_limit was exceeded. This would cause the VFS to drop
references on a fraction of the dentries in the dcache. The ARC
could then safely reclaim the memory used by these entries and
honor the arc_meta_limit. Unfortunately, when per-filesystem
shrinkers were added the old interfaces were made unavailable.
This change adds support to use the new per-filesystem shrinker
interface so we can continue to honor the arc_meta_limit. The
major benefit of the new interface is that we can now target
only the zfs filesystem for dentry and inode pruning. Thus we
can minimize any impact on the caching of other filesystems.
In the context of making this change several other important
issues related to managing the ARC were addressed, they include:
* The dnlc_reduce_cache() function which was called by the ARC
to drop dentries for the Posix layer was replaced with a generic
zfs_prune_t callback. The ZPL layer now registers a callback to
drop these dentries removing a layering violation which dates
back to the Solaris code. This callback can also be used by
other ARC consumers such as Lustre.
arc_add_prune_callback()
arc_remove_prune_callback()
* The arc_reduce_dnlc_percent module option has been changed to
arc_meta_prune for clarity. The dnlc functions are specific to
Solaris's VFS and have already been largely eliminated already.
The replacement tunable now represents the number of bytes the
prune callback will request when invoked.
* Less aggressively invoke the prune callback. We used to call
this whenever we exceeded the arc_meta_limit however that's not
strictly correct since it results in over zeleous reclaim of
dentries and inodes. It is now only called once the arc_meta_limit
is exceeded and every effort has been made to evict other data from
the ARC cache.
* More promptly manage exceeding the arc_meta_limit. When reading
meta data in to the cache if a buffer was unable to be recycled
notify the arc_reclaim thread to invoke the required prune.
* Added arcstat_prune kstat which is incremented when the ARC
is forced to request that a consumer prune its cache. Remember
this will only occur when the ARC has no other choice. If it
can evict buffers safely without invoking the prune callback
it will.
* This change is also expected to resolve the unexpect collapses
of the ARC cache. This would occur because when exceeded just the
arc_meta_limit reclaim presure would be excerted on the arc_c
value via arc_shrink(). This effectively shrunk the entire cache
when really we just needed to reclaim meta data.
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
Closes#466Closes#292
Directly changing inode->i_nlink is deprecated in Linux 3.2 by commit
SHA: bfe8684869601dacfcb2cd69ef8cfd9045f62170
Use the new set_nlink() kernel function instead.
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
Closes: #462
Added the necessary build infrastructure for building packages
compatible with the Arch Linux distribution. As such, one can now run:
$ ./configure
$ make pkg # Alternatively, one can run 'make arch' as well
on the Arch Linux machine to create two binary packages compatible with
the pacman package manager, one for the zfs userland utilities and
another for the zfs kernel modules. The new packages can then be
installed by running:
# pacman -U $package.pkg.tar.xz
In addition, source-only packages suitable for an Arch Linux chroot
environment or remote builder can also be build using the 'sarch' make
rule.
NOTE: Since the source dist tarball is created on the fly from the head
of the build tree, it's MD5 hash signature will be continually influx.
As a result, the md5sum variable was intentionally omitted from the
PKGBUILD files, and the '--skipinteg' makepkg option is used. This may
or may not have any serious security implications, as the source tarball
is not being downloaded from an outside source.
Signed-off-by: Prakash Surya <surya1@llnl.gov>
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
Closes#491
Some of the functions' purpose wasn't immediately obvious without
additional explanations. This commit adds these missing comments.
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
Update the code to use the bdi_setup_and_register() helper to
simplify the bdi integration code. The updated code now just
registers the bdi during mount and destroys it during unmount.
The only complication is that for 2.6.32 - 2.6.33 kernels the
helper wasn't available so in these cases the zfs code must
provide it. Luckily the bdi_setup_and_register() function
is trivial.
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
Closes#367
For a long time now the kernel has been moving away from using the
pdflush daemon to write 'old' dirty pages to disk. The primary reason
for this is because the pdflush daemon is single threaded and can be
a limiting factor for performance. Since pdflush sequentially walks
the dirty inode list for each super block any delay in processing can
slow down dirty page writeback for all filesystems.
The replacement for pdflush is called bdi (backing device info). The
bdi system involves creating a per-filesystem control structure each
with its own private sets of queues to manage writeback. The advantage
is greater parallelism which improves performance and prevents a single
filesystem from slowing writeback to the others.
For a long time both systems co-existed in the kernel so it wasn't
strictly required to implement the bdi scheme. However, as of
Linux 2.6.36 kernels the pdflush functionality has been retired.
Since ZFS already bypasses the page cache for most I/O this is only
an issue for mmap(2) writes which must go through the page cache.
Even then adding this missing support for newer kernels was overlooked
because there are other mechanisms which can trigger writeback.
However, there is one critical case where not implementing the bdi
functionality can cause problems. If an application handles a page
fault it can enter the balance_dirty_pages() callpath. This will
result in the application hanging until the number of dirty pages in
the system drops below the dirty ratio.
Without a registered backing_device_info for the filesystem the
dirty pages will not get written out. Thus the application will hang.
As mentioned above this was less of an issue with older kernels because
pdflush would eventually write out the dirty pages.
This change adds a backing_device_info structure to the zfs_sb_t
which is already allocated per-super block. It is then registered
when the filesystem mounted and unregistered on unmount. It will
not be registered for mounted snapshots which are read-only. This
change will result in flush-<pool> thread being dynamically created
and destroyed per-mounted filesystem for writeback.
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
Closes#174
This should simplify the code a bit by re-using existing code
to fork and exec a process.
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
Issue #190
At the moment we call exportfs -v every time we check whether an
NFS share is active. This happens every time you run a zfs or
zpool command, making them extremely slow when you have a lot of
exports. The time taken is approx O(n2) of the number of shares.
This commit stores the output from exportfs -v in a temporary file
and use this to speed up subsequent accesses.
This mechanism is still too slow - if you have tens of thousands
of NFS shares it will still be painful running ANY zfs/zpool
command.
Signed-off-by: Gunnar Beutner <gunnar@beutner.name>
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
Closes#341
Unlike most other Linux distributions archlinux installs its
init scripts in /etc/rc.d insead of /etc/init.d. This commit
provides an archlinux rc.d script for zfs and extends the
build infrastructure to ensure it get's installed in the
correct place.
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
Closes#322
The sharenfs and sharesmb properties depend on the libshare library
to export datasets via NFS and SMB. This commit implements the base
libshare functionality as well as support for managing NFS shares.
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
