readahead: introduce FMODE_RANDOM for POSIX_FADV_RANDOM
authorWu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Fri, 5 Mar 2010 21:42:03 +0000 (13:42 -0800)
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Sat, 6 Mar 2010 19:26:25 +0000 (11:26 -0800)
commit0141450f66c3c12a3aaa869748caa64241885cdf
treecab5f621dafd1f133d915e5c60aea160438a2e11
parent42e49608683ab25fbbbf9c40edb944601e543882
readahead: introduce FMODE_RANDOM for POSIX_FADV_RANDOM

This fixes inefficient page-by-page reads on POSIX_FADV_RANDOM.

POSIX_FADV_RANDOM used to set ra_pages=0, which leads to poor performance:
a 16K read will be carried out in 4 _sync_ 1-page reads.

In other places, ra_pages==0 means
- it's ramfs/tmpfs/hugetlbfs/sysfs/configfs
- some IO error happened
where multi-page read IO won't help or should be avoided.

POSIX_FADV_RANDOM actually want a different semantics: to disable the
*heuristic* readahead algorithm, and to use a dumb one which faithfully
submit read IO for whatever application requests.

So introduce a flag FMODE_RANDOM for POSIX_FADV_RANDOM.

Note that the random hint is not likely to help random reads performance
noticeably.  And it may be too permissive on huge request size (its IO
size is not limited by read_ahead_kb).

In Quentin's report (http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/12/24/145), the overall
(NFS read) performance of the application increased by 313%!

Tested-by: Quentin Barnes <qbarnes+nfs@yahoo-inc.com>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Cc: Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>
Cc: Steven Whitehouse <swhiteho@redhat.com>
Cc: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: Trond Myklebust <Trond.Myklebust@netapp.com>
Cc: Chuck Lever <chuck.lever@oracle.com>
Cc: <stable@kernel.org> [2.6.33.x]
Cc: <qbarnes+nfs@yahoo-inc.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
include/linux/fs.h
mm/fadvise.c
mm/readahead.c