[PATCH] make the pagecache lock irq-safe.

Intro to these patches:

- Major surgery against the pagecache, radix-tree and writeback code.  This
  work is to address the O_DIRECT-vs-buffered data exposure horrors which
  we've been struggling with for months.

  As a side-effect, 32 bytes are saved from struct inode and eight bytes
  are removed from struct page.  At a cost of approximately 2.5 bits per page
  in the radix tree nodes on 4k pagesize, assuming the pagecache is densely
  populated.  Not all pages are pagecache; other pages gain the full 8 byte
  saving.

  This change will break any arch code which is using page->list and will
  also break any arch code which is using page->lru of memory which was
  obtained from slab.

  The basic problem which we (mainly Daniel McNeil) have been struggling
  with is in getting a really reliable fsync() across the page lists while
  other processes are performing writeback against the same file.  It's like
  juggling four bars of wet soap with your eyes shut while someone is
  whacking you with a baseball bat.  Daniel pretty much has the problem
  plugged but I suspect that's just because we don't have testcases to
  trigger the remaining problems.  The complexity and additional locking
  which those patches add is worrisome.

  So the approach taken here is to remove the page lists altogether and
  replace the list-based writeback and wait operations with in-order
  radix-tree walks.

  The radix-tree code has been enhanced to support "tagging" of pages, for
  later searches for pages which have a particular tag set.  This means that
  we can ask the radix tree code "find me the next 16 dirty pages starting at
  pagecache index N" and it will do that in O(log64(N)) time.

  This affects I/O scheduling potentially quite significantly.  It is no
  longer the case that the kernel will submit pages for I/O in the order in
  which the application dirtied them.  We instead submit them in file-offset
  order all the time.

  This is likely to be advantageous when applications are seeking all over
  a large file randomly writing small amounts of data.  I haven't performed
  much benchmarking, but tiobench random write throughput seems to be
  increased by 30%.  Other tests appear to be unaltered.  dbench may have got
  10-20% quicker, but it's variable.

  There is one large file which everyone seeks all over randomly writing
  small amounts of data: the blockdev mapping which caches filesystem
  metadata.  The kernel's IO submission patterns for this are now ideal.


  Because writeback and wait-for-writeback use a tree walk instead of a
  list walk they are no longer livelockable.  This probably means that we no
  longer need to hold i_sem across O_SYNC writes and perhaps fsync() and
  fdatasync().  This may be beneficial for databases: multiple processes
  writing and syncing different parts of the same file at the same time can
  now all submit and wait upon writes to just their own little bit of the
  file, so we can get a lot more data into the queues.

  It is trivial to implement a part-file-fdatasync() as well, so
  applications can say "sync the file from byte N to byte M", and multiple
  applications can do this concurrently.  This is easy for ext2 filesystems,
  but probably needs lots of work for data-journalled filesystems and XFS and
  it probably doesn't offer much benefit over an i_semless O_SYNC write.


  These patches can end up making ext3 (even) slower:

	for i in 1 2 3 4
	do
		dd if=/dev/zero of=$i bs=1M count=2000 &
	done          

  runs awfully slow on SMP.  This is, yet again, because all the file
  blocks are jumbled up and the per-file linear writeout causes tons of
  seeking.  The above test runs sweetly on UP because the on UP we don't
  allocate blocks to different files in parallel.

  Mingming and Badari are working on getting block reservation working for
  ext3 (preallocation on steroids).  That should fix ext3 up.


This patch:

- Later, we'll need to access the radix trees from inside disk I/O
  completion handlers.  So make mapping->page_lock irq-safe.  And rename it
  to tree_lock to reliably break any missed conversions.

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/fs.h b/include/linux/fs.h
index 91ff9225ba86..f64f8fb2f819 100644
--- a/include/linux/fs.h
+++ b/include/linux/fs.h
@@ -322,7 +322,7 @@ struct backing_dev_info;
 struct address_space {
 	struct inode		*host;		/* owner: inode, block_device */
 	struct radix_tree_root	page_tree;	/* radix tree of all pages */
-	spinlock_t		page_lock;	/* and spinlock protecting it */
+	spinlock_t		tree_lock;	/* and spinlock protecting it */
 	struct list_head	clean_pages;	/* list of clean pages */
 	struct list_head	dirty_pages;	/* list of dirty pages */
 	struct list_head	locked_pages;	/* list of locked pages */