[XFS] Lazy Superblock Counters

When we have a couple of hundred transactions on the fly at once, they all
typically modify the on disk superblock in some way.
create/unclink/mkdir/rmdir modify inode counts, allocation/freeing modify
free block counts.

When these counts are modified in a transaction, they must eventually lock
the superblock buffer and apply the mods. The buffer then remains locked
until the transaction is committed into the incore log buffer. The result
of this is that with enough transactions on the fly the incore superblock
buffer becomes a bottleneck.

The result of contention on the incore superblock buffer is that
transaction rates fall - the more pressure that is put on the superblock
buffer, the slower things go.

The key to removing the contention is to not require the superblock fields
in question to be locked. We do that by not marking the superblock dirty
in the transaction. IOWs, we modify the incore superblock but do not
modify the cached superblock buffer. In short, we do not log superblock
modifications to critical fields in the superblock on every transaction.
In fact we only do it just before we write the superblock to disk every
sync period or just before unmount.

This creates an interesting problem - if we don't log or write out the
fields in every transaction, then how do the values get recovered after a
crash? the answer is simple - we keep enough duplicate, logged information
in other structures that we can reconstruct the correct count after log
recovery has been performed.

It is the AGF and AGI structures that contain the duplicate information;
after recovery, we walk every AGI and AGF and sum their individual
counters to get the correct value, and we do a transaction into the log to
correct them. An optimisation of this is that if we have a clean unmount
record, we know the value in the superblock is correct, so we can avoid
the summation walk under normal conditions and so mount/recovery times do
not change under normal operation.

One wrinkle that was discovered during development was that the blocks
used in the freespace btrees are never accounted for in the AGF counters.
This was once a valid optimisation to make; when the filesystem is full,
the free space btrees are empty and consume no space. Hence when it
matters, the "accounting" is correct. But that means the when we do the
AGF summations, we would not have a correct count and xfs_check would
complain. Hence a new counter was added to track the number of blocks used
by the free space btrees. This is an *on-disk format change*.

As a result of this, lazy superblock counters are a mkfs option and at the
moment on linux there is no way to convert an old filesystem. This is
possible - xfs_db can be used to twiddle the right bits and then
xfs_repair will do the format conversion for you. Similarly, you can
convert backwards as well. At some point we'll add functionality to
xfs_admin to do the bit twiddling easily....

SGI-PV: 964999
SGI-Modid: xfs-linux-melb:xfs-kern:28652a

Signed-off-by: David Chinner <dgc@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Tim Shimmin <tes@sgi.com>

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/fs/xfs/xfs_mount.h b/fs/xfs/xfs_mount.h
index 871a5bf..0bca2d4 100644
--- a/fs/xfs/xfs_mount.h
+++ b/fs/xfs/xfs_mount.h
@@ -429,12 +429,12 @@ typedef struct xfs_mount {
 /*
  * Flags for m_flags.
  */
-#define	XFS_MOUNT_WSYNC		(1ULL << 0)	/* for nfs - all metadata ops
+#define XFS_MOUNT_WSYNC		(1ULL << 0)	/* for nfs - all metadata ops
 						   must be synchronous except
 						   for space allocations */
-#define	XFS_MOUNT_INO64		(1ULL << 1)
+#define XFS_MOUNT_INO64		(1ULL << 1)
 			     /* (1ULL << 2)	-- currently unused */
-			     /* (1ULL << 3)	-- currently unused */
+#define XFS_MOUNT_WAS_CLEAN	(1ULL << 3)
 #define XFS_MOUNT_FS_SHUTDOWN	(1ULL << 4)	/* atomic stop of all filesystem
 						   operations, typically for
 						   disk errors in metadata */
@@ -511,6 +511,8 @@ xfs_preferred_iosize(xfs_mount_t *mp)
 
 #define XFS_MAXIOFFSET(mp)	((mp)->m_maxioffset)
 
+#define XFS_LAST_UNMOUNT_WAS_CLEAN(mp)	\
+				((mp)->m_flags & XFS_MOUNT_WAS_CLEAN)
 #define XFS_FORCED_SHUTDOWN(mp)	((mp)->m_flags & XFS_MOUNT_FS_SHUTDOWN)
 #define xfs_force_shutdown(m,f)	\
 	bhv_vfs_force_shutdown((XFS_MTOVFS(m)), f, __FILE__, __LINE__)
@@ -602,6 +604,7 @@ typedef struct xfs_mod_sb {
 
 extern xfs_mount_t *xfs_mount_init(void);
 extern void	xfs_mod_sb(xfs_trans_t *, __int64_t);
+extern int	xfs_log_sbcount(xfs_mount_t *, uint);
 extern void	xfs_mount_free(xfs_mount_t *mp, int remove_bhv);
 extern int	xfs_mountfs(struct bhv_vfs *, xfs_mount_t *mp, int);
 extern void	xfs_mountfs_check_barriers(xfs_mount_t *mp);
@@ -618,6 +621,7 @@ extern int	xfs_mod_incore_sb_batch(xfs_mount_t *, xfs_mod_sb_t *,
 extern struct xfs_buf *xfs_getsb(xfs_mount_t *, int);
 extern int	xfs_readsb(xfs_mount_t *, int);
 extern void	xfs_freesb(xfs_mount_t *);
+extern int	xfs_fs_writable(xfs_mount_t *);
 extern void	xfs_do_force_shutdown(bhv_desc_t *, int, char *, int);
 extern int	xfs_syncsub(xfs_mount_t *, int, int *);
 extern int	xfs_sync_inodes(xfs_mount_t *, int, int *);