freebsd-skq/sbin/mdconfig
Bruce Evans 9e5ed8593f Use VOP_ADVISE() with POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED instead of IO_DIRECT to
implement not double-caching for reads from vnode-backed md devices.
Use VOP_ADVISE() similarly instead of !IO_DIRECT unsimilarly for writes.
Add a "cache" option to mdconfig to allow changing the default of not
caching.

This depends on a recent commit to fix VOP_ADVISE().  A previous version
had optimizations for sequential i/o's (merge the i/o's and only uncache
for discontiguous i/o's and for full blocks), but optimizations and
knowledge of block boundaries belong in VOP_ADVISE().  Read-ahead should
also be handled better, by supporting it in md and discarding it in
VOP_ADVISE().

POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED is ignored by zfs, but so is IO_DIRECT.

POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED works better than IO_DIRECT if it is not ignored,
since it only discards from the buffer cache immediately, while
IO_DIRECT also discards from the page cache immediately.

IO_DIRECT was not used for writes since it was claimed to be too slow,
but most of the slowness for writes is from doing them synchronously by
default.  Non-synchronous writes still deadlock in many cases.

IO_DIRECT only has a special implementation for ffs reads with DIRECTIO
configured.  Otherwise, if it is not ignored than it uses the buffer and
page caches normally except for discarding everything after each i/o,
and then it has much the same overheads as POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED.  The
overheads for reading with ffs and DIRECTIO were similar in tests of md.

Reviewed by:	kib
2018-12-21 08:15:31 +00:00
..
tests
Makefile
Makefile.depend
mdconfig.8 Use VOP_ADVISE() with POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED instead of IO_DIRECT to 2018-12-21 08:15:31 +00:00
mdconfig.c Use VOP_ADVISE() with POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED instead of IO_DIRECT to 2018-12-21 08:15:31 +00:00