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authorLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2014-12-08 21:10:03 -0800
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2014-12-08 21:10:03 -0800
commit140dfc9299c33bbfc9350fa061f5ab65cb83df13 (patch)
tree09508691964e277f4835d30f7b9c3962e8cac596 /Documentation
parentf94784bdb114439eb3a5e62343826887bbf3f37c (diff)
parent1a71d6ffe18c0d0f03fc8531949cc8ed41d702ee (diff)
Merge tag 'dm-3.19-changes' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/device-mapper/linux-dm
Pull device mapper updates from Mike Snitzer: - Significant DM thin-provisioning performance improvements to meet performance requirements that were requested by the Gluster distributed filesystem. Specifically, dm-thinp now takes care to aggregate IO that will be issued to the same thinp block before issuing IO to the underlying devices. This really helps improve performance on HW RAID6 devices that have a writeback cache because it avoids RMW in the HW RAID controller. - Some stable fixes: fix leak in DM bufio if integrity profiles were enabled, use memzero_explicit in DM crypt to avoid any potential for information leak, and a DM cache fix to properly mark a cache block dirty if it was promoted to the cache via the overwrite optimization. - A few simple DM persistent data library fixes - DM cache multiqueue policy block promotion improvements. - DM cache discard improvements that take advantage of range (multiblock) discard support in the DM bio-prison. This allows for much more efficient bulk discard processing (e.g. when mkfs.xfs discards the entire device). - Some small optimizations in DM core and RCU deference cleanups - DM core changes to suspend/resume code to introduce the new internal suspend/resume interface that the DM thin-pool target now uses to suspend/resume active thin devices when the thin-pool must suspend/resume. This avoids forcing userspace to track all active thin volumes in a thin-pool when the thin-pool is suspended for the purposes of metadata or data space resize. * tag 'dm-3.19-changes' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/device-mapper/linux-dm: (49 commits) dm crypt: use memzero_explicit for on-stack buffer dm space map metadata: fix sm_bootstrap_get_count() dm space map metadata: fix sm_bootstrap_get_nr_blocks() dm bufio: fix memleak when using a dm_buffer's inline bio dm cache: fix spurious cell_defer when dealing with partial block at end of device dm cache: dirty flag was mistakenly being cleared when promoting via overwrite dm cache: only use overwrite optimisation for promotion when in writeback mode dm cache: discard block size must be a multiple of cache block size dm cache: fix a harmless race when working out if a block is discarded dm cache: when reloading a discard bitset allow for a different discard block size dm cache: fix some issues with the new discard range support dm array: if resizing the array is a noop set the new root to the old one dm: use rcu_dereference_protected instead of rcu_dereference dm thin: fix pool_io_hints to avoid looking at max_hw_sectors dm thin: suspend/resume active thin devices when reloading thin-pool dm: enhance internal suspend and resume interface dm thin: do not allow thin device activation while pool is suspended dm: add presuspend_undo hook to target_type dm: return earlier from dm_blk_ioctl if target doesn't implement .ioctl dm thin: remove stale 'trim' message in block comment above pool_message ...
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/device-mapper/cache-policies.txt24
1 files changed, 15 insertions, 9 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/device-mapper/cache-policies.txt b/Documentation/device-mapper/cache-policies.txt
index 66c2774c0c64..0d124a971801 100644
--- a/Documentation/device-mapper/cache-policies.txt
+++ b/Documentation/device-mapper/cache-policies.txt
@@ -47,20 +47,26 @@ Message and constructor argument pairs are:
'discard_promote_adjustment <value>'
The sequential threshold indicates the number of contiguous I/Os
-required before a stream is treated as sequential. The random threshold
+required before a stream is treated as sequential. Once a stream is
+considered sequential it will bypass the cache. The random threshold
is the number of intervening non-contiguous I/Os that must be seen
before the stream is treated as random again.
The sequential and random thresholds default to 512 and 4 respectively.
-Large, sequential ios are probably better left on the origin device
-since spindles tend to have good bandwidth. The io_tracker counts
-contiguous I/Os to try to spot when the io is in one of these sequential
-modes.
-
-Internally the mq policy maintains a promotion threshold variable. If
-the hit count of a block not in the cache goes above this threshold it
-gets promoted to the cache. The read, write and discard promote adjustment
+Large, sequential I/Os are probably better left on the origin device
+since spindles tend to have good sequential I/O bandwidth. The
+io_tracker counts contiguous I/Os to try to spot when the I/O is in one
+of these sequential modes. But there are use-cases for wanting to
+promote sequential blocks to the cache (e.g. fast application startup).
+If sequential threshold is set to 0 the sequential I/O detection is
+disabled and sequential I/O will no longer implicitly bypass the cache.
+Setting the random threshold to 0 does _not_ disable the random I/O
+stream detection.
+
+Internally the mq policy determines a promotion threshold. If the hit
+count of a block not in the cache goes above this threshold it gets
+promoted to the cache. The read, write and discard promote adjustment
tunables allow you to tweak the promotion threshold by adding a small
value based on the io type. They default to 4, 8 and 1 respectively.
If you're trying to quickly warm a new cache device you may wish to