block: initial patch for on-stack per-task plugging

This patch adds support for creating a queuing context outside
of the queue itself. This enables us to batch up pieces of IO
before grabbing the block device queue lock and submitting them to
the IO scheduler.

The context is created on the stack of the process and assigned in
the task structure, so that we can auto-unplug it if we hit a schedule
event.

The current queue plugging happens implicitly if IO is submitted to
an empty device, yet callers have to remember to unplug that IO when
they are going to wait for it. This is an ugly API and has caused bugs
in the past. Additionally, it requires hacks in the vm (->sync_page()
callback) to handle that logic. By switching to an explicit plugging
scheme we make the API a lot nicer and can get rid of the ->sync_page()
hack in the vm.

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>

1 files changed, 6 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/sched.h b/include/linux/sched.h
index 777d8a5ed06b..96ac22643742 100644
--- a/include/linux/sched.h
+++ b/include/linux/sched.h
@@ -99,6 +99,7 @@ struct robust_list_head;
 struct bio_list;
 struct fs_struct;
 struct perf_event_context;
+struct blk_plug;
 
 /*
  * List of flags we want to share for kernel threads,
@@ -1429,6 +1430,11 @@ struct task_struct {
 /* stacked block device info */
         struct bio_list *bio_list;
 
+#ifdef CONFIG_BLOCK
+/* stack plugging */
+        struct blk_plug *plug;
+#endif
+
 /* VM state */
         struct reclaim_state *reclaim_state;