xfs: CIL checkpoint flushes caches unconditionally
Currently every journal IO is issued as REQ_PREFLUSH | REQ_FUA to guarantee the ordering requirements the journal has w.r.t. metadata writeback. THe two ordering constraints are: 1. we cannot overwrite metadata in the journal until we guarantee that the dirty metadata has been written back in place and is stable. 2. we cannot write back dirty metadata until it has been written to the journal and guaranteed to be stable (and hence recoverable) in the journal. These rules apply to the atomic transactions recorded in the journal, not to the journal IO itself. Hence we need to ensure metadata is stable before we start writing a new transaction to the journal (guarantee #1), and we need to ensure the entire transaction is stable in the journal before we start metadata writeback (guarantee #2). The ordering guarantees of #1 are currently provided by REQ_PREFLUSH being added to every iclog IO. This causes the journal IO to issue a cache flush and wait for it to complete before issuing the write IO to the journal. Hence all completed metadata IO is guaranteed to be stable before the journal overwrites the old metadata. However, for long running CIL checkpoints that might do a thousand journal IOs, we don't need every single one of these iclog IOs to issue a cache flush - the cache flush done before the first iclog is submitted is sufficient to cover the entire range in the log that the checkpoint will overwrite because the CIL space reservation guarantees the tail of the log (completed metadata) is already beyond the range of the checkpoint write. Hence we only need a full cache flush between closing off the CIL checkpoint context (i.e. when the push switches it out) and issuing the first journal IO. Rather than plumbing this through to the journal IO, we can start this cache flush the moment the CIL context is owned exclusively by the push worker. The cache flush can be in progress while we process the CIL ready for writing, hence reducing the latency of the initial iclog write. This is especially true for large checkpoints, where we might have to process hundreds of thousands of log vectors before we issue the first iclog write. In these cases, it is likely the cache flush has already been completed by the time we have built the CIL log vector chain. Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: Chandan Babu R <chandanrlinux@gmail.com> Reviewed-by: Darrick J. Wong <djwong@kernel.org> Reviewed-by: Brian Foster <bfoster@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: Allison Henderson <allison.henderson@oracle.com> Signed-off-by: Darrick J. Wong <djwong@kernel.org>
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