freebsd with flexible iflib nic queues
Go to file
Brian Behlendorf 76659dc110 Add backing_device_info per-filesystem
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
2011-08-04 13:37:38 -07:00
cmd Add backing_device_info per-filesystem 2011-08-04 13:37:38 -07:00
config Add backing_device_info per-filesystem 2011-08-04 13:37:38 -07:00
dracut Add backing_device_info per-filesystem 2011-08-04 13:37:38 -07:00
etc Add backing_device_info per-filesystem 2011-08-04 13:37:38 -07:00
include Add backing_device_info per-filesystem 2011-08-04 13:37:38 -07:00
lib Add backing_device_info per-filesystem 2011-08-04 13:37:38 -07:00
man Add backing_device_info per-filesystem 2011-08-04 13:37:38 -07:00
module Add backing_device_info per-filesystem 2011-08-04 13:37:38 -07:00
patches Add build system 2010-08-31 13:41:27 -07:00
scripts Add backing_device_info per-filesystem 2011-08-04 13:37:38 -07:00
.gitignore Ignore unsigned module build products 2010-03-09 14:14:09 -08:00
AUTHORS Add "ashift" property to zpool create 2011-06-17 16:35:49 -07:00
autogen.sh Make autogen.sh executable 2011-07-26 10:15:35 -07:00
ChangeLog Add build system 2010-08-31 13:41:27 -07:00
configure Add backing_device_info per-filesystem 2011-08-04 13:37:38 -07:00
configure.ac Turn the init.d scripts into autoconf config files 2011-08-01 09:54:44 -07:00
COPYING Relocate COPYING+COPYRIGHT, remove README cruft 2008-12-01 15:34:53 -08:00
COPYRIGHT Update COPYRIGHT to reference zpios CDDL exceptions. 2010-05-18 14:25:28 -07:00
DISCLAIMER Update COPYRIGHT and DISCLAIMER. 2010-05-18 10:32:23 -07:00
Makefile.am Add dracut support 2011-03-17 16:52:04 -07:00
Makefile.in Add backing_device_info per-filesystem 2011-08-04 13:37:38 -07:00
META Prep zfs-0.6.0-rc5 tag 2011-07-01 15:24:34 -07:00
OPENSOLARIS.LICENSE Add CDDL license file 2008-12-01 14:49:34 -08:00
README.markdown Fix markdown rendering 2010-09-15 09:09:37 -07:00
zfs_config.h.in Add backing_device_info per-filesystem 2011-08-04 13:37:38 -07:00
zfs-modules.spec.in Fix rebuildable RPMs for el6/ch5 2011-04-08 10:22:42 -07:00
zfs-script-config.sh.in Unconditionally load core kernel modules 2010-11-11 11:38:25 -08:00
ZFS.RELEASE Update to onnv_147 2010-08-26 14:24:34 -07:00
zfs.spec.in Remove zfs service only on uninstall, not on upgrade 2011-07-08 11:44:17 -07:00

Native ZFS for Linux! ZFS is an advanced file system and volume manager which was originally developed for Solaris. It has been successfully ported to FreeBSD and now there is a functional Linux ZFS kernel port too. The port currently includes a fully functional and stable SPA, DMU, and ZVOL with a ZFS Posix Layer (ZPL) on the way!

$ ./configure
$ make pkg

Full documentation for building, configuring, and using ZFS can be found at: http://zfsonlinux.org