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
The .get_sb callback has been replaced by a .mount callback
in the file_system_type structure. When using the new
interface the caller must now use the mount_nodev() helper.
Unfortunately, the new interface no longer passes the vfsmount
down to the zfs layers. This poses a problem for the existing
implementation because we currently save this pointer in the
super block for latter use. It provides our only entry point
in to the namespace layer for manipulating certain mount options.
This needed to be done originally to allow commands like
'zfs set atime=off tank' to work properly. It also allowed me
to keep more of the original Solaris code unmodified. Under
Solaris there is a 1-to-1 mapping between a mount point and a
file system so this is a fairly natural thing to do. However,
under Linux they many be multiple entries in the namespace
which reference the same filesystem. Thus keeping a back
reference from the filesystem to the namespace is complicated.
Rather than introduce some ugly hack to get the vfsmount and
continue as before. I'm leveraging this API change to update
the ZFS code to do things in a more natural way for Linux.
This has the upside that is resolves the compatibility issue
for the long term and fixes several other minor bugs which
have been reported.
This commit updates the code to remove this vfsmount back
reference entirely. All modifications to filesystem mount
options are now passed in to the kernel via a '-o remount'.
This is the expected Linux mechanism and allows the namespace
to properly handle any options which apply to it before passing
them on to the file system itself.
Aside from fixing the compatibility issue, removing the
vfsmount has had the benefit of simplifying the code. This
change which fairly involved has turned out nicely.
Closes#246Closes#217Closes#187Closes#248Closes#231
Register the missing .remount_fs handler. This handler isn't strictly
required because the VFS does a pretty good job updating most of the
MS_* flags. However, there's no harm in using the hook to call the
registered zpl callback for various MS_* flags. Additionaly, this
allows us to lay the ground work for more complicated argument parsing
in the future.
I appologize in advance why to many things ended up in this commit.
When it could be seperated in to a whole series of commits teasing
that all apart now would take considerable time and I'm not sure
there's much merrit in it. As such I'll just summerize the intent
of the changes which are all (or partly) in this commit. Broadly
the intent is to remove as much Solaris specific code as possible
and replace it with native Linux equivilants. More specifically:
1) Replace all instances of zfsvfs_t with zfs_sb_t. While the
type is largely the same calling it private super block data
rather than a zfsvfs is more consistent with how Linux names
this. While non critical it makes the code easier to read when
your thinking in Linux friendly VFS terms.
2) Replace vnode_t with struct inode. The Linux VFS doesn't have
the notion of a vnode and there's absolutely no good reason to
create one. There are in fact several good reasons to remove it.
It just adds overhead on Linux if we were to manage one, it
conplicates the code, and it likely will lead to bugs so there's
a good change it will be out of date. The code has been updated
to remove all need for this type.
3) Replace all vtype_t's with umode types. Along with this shift
all uses of types to mode bits. The Solaris code would pass a
vtype which is redundant with the Linux mode. Just update all the
code to use the Linux mode macros and remove this redundancy.
4) Remove using of vn_* helpers and replace where needed with
inode helpers. The big example here is creating iput_aync to
replace vn_rele_async. Other vn helpers will be addressed as
needed but they should be be emulated. They are a Solaris VFS'ism
and should simply be replaced with Linux equivilants.
5) Update znode alloc/free code. Under Linux it's common to
embed the inode specific data with the inode itself. This removes
the need for an extra memory allocation. In zfs this information
is called a znode and it now embeds the inode with it. Allocators
have been updated accordingly.
6) Minimal integration with the vfs flags for setting up the
super block and handling mount options has been added this
code will need to be refined but functionally it's all there.
This will be the first and last of these to large to review commits.
This code is used for snapshot and heavily leverages Solaris
functionality we do not want to reimplement. These files have
been removed, including references to them, and will be replaced
by a zfs_snap.c/zpl_snap.c implementation which handles snapshots.
One of the neat tricks an autoconf style project is capable of
is allow configurion/building in a directory other than the
source directory. The major advantage to this is that you can
build the project various different ways while making changes
in a single source tree.
For example, this project is designed to work on various different
Linux distributions each of which work slightly differently. This
means that changes need to verified on each of those supported
distributions perferably before the change is committed to the
public git repo.
Using nfs and custom build directories makes this much easier.
I now have a single source tree in nfs mounted on several different
systems each running a supported distribution. When I make a
change to the source base I suspect may break things I can
concurrently build from the same source on all the systems each
in their own subdirectory.
wget -c http://github.com/downloads/behlendorf/zfs/zfs-x.y.z.tar.gz
tar -xzf zfs-x.y.z.tar.gz
cd zfs-x-y-z
------------------------- run concurrently ----------------------
<ubuntu system> <fedora system> <debian system> <rhel6 system>
mkdir ubuntu mkdir fedora mkdir debian mkdir rhel6
cd ubuntu cd fedora cd debian cd rhel6
../configure ../configure ../configure ../configure
make make make make
make check make check make check make check
This change also moves many of the include headers from individual
incude/sys directories under the modules directory in to a single
top level include directory. This has the advantage of making
the build rules cleaner and logically it makes a bit more sense.
Brian Behlendorf