Commit 4e7ea81db5(ext4: restructure writeback path) introduces another
performance regression on random write:
- one more page may be added to ext4 extent in
mpage_prepare_extent_to_map, and will be submitted for I/O so
nr_to_write will become -1 before 'done' is set
- the worse thing is that dirty pages may still be retrieved from page
cache after nr_to_write becomes negative, so lots of small chunks
can be submitted to block device when page writeback is catching up
with write path, and performance is hurted.
On one arm A15 board with sata 3.0 SSD(CPU: 1.5GHz dura core, RAM:
2GB, SATA controller: 3.0Gbps), this patch can improve below test's
result from 157MB/sec to 174MB/sec(>10%):
dd if=/dev/zero of=./z.img bs=8K count=512K
The above test is actually prototype of block write in bonnie++
utility.
This patch makes sure no more pages than nr_to_write can be added to
extent for mapping, so that nr_to_write won't become negative.
Cc: linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org
Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Ming Lei <ming.lei@canonical.com>
Signed-off-by: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>