From: tytso on
On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 02:26:57PM -0500, Jayson R. King wrote:
> From: Aneesh Kumar K.V <aneesh.kumar(a)linux.vnet.ibm.com>
> Date: Thu Oct 16 10:10:36 2008 -0400
> Subject: ext4: Fix file fragmentation during large file write.
>
> commit 22208dedbd7626e5fc4339c417f8d24cc21f79d7 upstream.
>
> The range_cyclic writeback mode uses the address_space writeback_index
> as the start index for writeback. With delayed allocation we were
> updating writeback_index wrongly resulting in highly fragmented file.
> This patch reduces the number of extents reduced from 4000 to 27 for a
> 3GB file.

This isn't a critical bug fix either. I don't really care a whole
lot, since I don't plan to support ext4 with all of these patches but
if you haven't been doing a full set of testing with these patches,
I'd be very concerned about whether ext4 would be stable after
applying this patch series.

What sort of testing _have_ you done?

- Ted

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From: Jayson R. King on
On 05/28/2010 08:06 PM, tytso(a)mit.edu wrote:
> On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 02:26:57PM -0500, Jayson R. King wrote:
>> From: Aneesh Kumar K.V<aneesh.kumar(a)linux.vnet.ibm.com>
>> Date: Thu Oct 16 10:10:36 2008 -0400
>> Subject: ext4: Fix file fragmentation during large file write.
>>
>> commit 22208dedbd7626e5fc4339c417f8d24cc21f79d7 upstream.
>>
>> The range_cyclic writeback mode uses the address_space writeback_index
>> as the start index for writeback. With delayed allocation we were
>> updating writeback_index wrongly resulting in highly fragmented file.
>> This patch reduces the number of extents reduced from 4000 to 27 for a
>> 3GB file.
>
> This isn't a critical bug fix either. I don't really care a whole
> lot, since I don't plan to support ext4 with all of these patches but
> if you haven't been doing a full set of testing with these patches,
> I'd be very concerned about whether ext4 would be stable after
> applying this patch series.
>
> What sort of testing _have_ you done?

I've ran dbench for hours on an ext4 volume followed by fsck on the
volume. Without the patches (particularly, just the last patch, "ext4:
Implement range_cyclic..."), a typical, sustained moderate to high ext4
fs load on .27 would often lead to a deadlock. A good demonstration is
to run "dbench 500" which will usually cause a deadlock in a couple of
minutes.

I wasn't aware of a way to apply the deadlock fix in "ext4: Implement
range_cyclic..." without also introducing this patch, since some of the
blocks it touches are created by this patch.

Thanks for looking.

Rgds,

Jayson
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