f2fs: introduce f2fs_issue_flush to avoid redundant flush issue

Some storage devices show relatively high latencies to complete cache_flush
commands, even though their normal IO speed is prettry much high. In such
the case, it needs to merge cache_flush commands as much as possible to avoid
issuing them redundantly.
So, this patch introduces a mount option, "-o flush_merge", to mitigate such
the overhead.

If this option is enabled by user, F2FS merges the cache_flush commands and then
issues just one cache_flush on behalf of them. Once the single command is
finished, F2FS sends a completion signal to all the pending threads.

Note that, this option can be used under a workload consisting of very intensive
concurrent fsync calls, while the storage handles cache_flush commands slowly.

Signed-off-by: Jaegeuk Kim <jaegeuk.kim@samsung.com>

1 files changed, 4 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/f2fs.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/f2fs.txt
index 2f6d0218dd22..25311e113e75 100644
--- a/Documentation/filesystems/f2fs.txt
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/f2fs.txt
@@ -122,6 +122,10 @@ disable_ext_identify   Disable the extension list configured by mkfs, so f2fs
 inline_xattr           Enable the inline xattrs feature.
 inline_data            Enable the inline data feature: New created small(<~3.4k)
                        files can be written into inode block.
+flush_merge            Merge concurrent cache_flush commands as much as possible
+                       to eliminate redundant command issues. If the underlying
+                       device handles the cache_flush command relatively slowly,
+                       recommend to enable this option.
 
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