xfs: Reduce log force overhead for delayed logging

Delayed logging adds some serialisation to the log force process to
ensure that it does not deference a bad commit context structure
when determining if a CIL push is necessary or not. It does this by
grabing the CIL context lock exclusively, then dropping it before
pushing the CIL if necessary. This causes serialisation of all log
forces and pushes regardless of whether a force is necessary or not.
As a result fsync heavy workloads (like dbench) can be significantly
slower with delayed logging than without.

To avoid this penalty, copy the current sequence from the context to
the CIL structure when they are swapped. This allows us to do
unlocked checks on the current sequence without having to worry
about dereferencing context structures that may have already been
freed. Hence we can remove the CIL context locking in the forcing
code and only call into the push code if the current context matches
the sequence we need to force.

By passing the sequence into the push code, we can check the
sequence again once we have the CIL lock held exclusive and abort if
the sequence has already been pushed. This avoids a lock round-trip
and unnecessary CIL pushes when we have racing push calls.

The result is that the regression in dbench performance goes away -
this change improves dbench performance on a ramdisk from ~2100MB/s
to ~2500MB/s. This compares favourably to not using delayed logging
which retuns ~2500MB/s for the same workload.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>

1 files changed, 11 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/fs/xfs/xfs_log_priv.h b/fs/xfs/xfs_log_priv.h
index 8c072618965c..ced52b98b322 100644
--- a/fs/xfs/xfs_log_priv.h
+++ b/fs/xfs/xfs_log_priv.h
@@ -422,6 +422,7 @@ struct xfs_cil {
         struct rw_semaphore     xc_ctx_lock;
         struct list_head        xc_committing;
         sv_t                    xc_commit_wait;
+        xfs_lsn_t               xc_current_sequence;
 };
 
 /*
@@ -562,8 +563,16 @@ int	xlog_cil_init(struct log *log);
 void    xlog_cil_init_post_recovery(struct log *log);
 void    xlog_cil_destroy(struct log *log);
 
-int     xlog_cil_push(struct log *log, int push_now);
-xfs_lsn_t xlog_cil_push_lsn(struct log *log, xfs_lsn_t push_sequence);
+/*
+ * CIL force routines
+ */
+xfs_lsn_t xlog_cil_force_lsn(struct log *log, xfs_lsn_t sequence);
+
+static inline void
+xlog_cil_force(struct log *log)
+{
+        xlog_cil_force_lsn(log, log->l_cilp->xc_current_sequence);
+}
 
 /*
  * Unmount record type is used as a pseudo transaction type for the ticket.