Re: [Ext2-devel] [RFC] [PATCH] Reducing average ext2 fsck time through fs-wide dirty bit]

On Fri, 2006-03-24 at 10:48 -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
Valerie Henson <val_henson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Wed, Mar 22, 2006 at 05:55:03PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
Valerie Henson <val_henson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

ext2 is simpler and faster than ext3 in many cases. This is sort of
cheating; ext2 is simpler and faster because it makes no effort to
maintain on-disk consistency and can skip annoying things like, oh,
reserving space in the journal. I am looking for ways to make ext2
cheat even more.


But it might be feasible to knock up an ext3-- in which all the journal
operations are stubbed out.

Hmm... Could we get the mark_buffer_dirty/mark_inode_dirty logic
right?

All things are possible ;) One might add a new
ext3_minus_minus_mark_buffer_dirty(), for example, put that in all the
right places.

Probably create a list in the stubbed journal functions and
then mark them dirty in the journal close? However, half the reason
I'm working on ext2 is the simplicity of the code - stubbing it out
would solve the performance problem but not the complexity problem.

Well ext3-- won't do anything to simplify the ext3 codebase. It was just a
thought..

Note that ext3's habit of clearing indirect blocks on truncate would
break some things I want to do in the future. (Insert secret plans
here.)

Ah. I guess one would need to port the ext2 truncate code.



There are reasons for zeroing indirect blocks on truncate:

* There are limits to the size of a single journal transaction
(1/4 of the journal size). When truncating a large fragmented
file, it may require modifying so many block bitmaps and group
descriptors that it forces a journal transaction to close out,
stalling the unlink operation.
* Because of this per-transaction limit, truncate needs to zero
the [dt]indirect blocks starting from the end of the file, in
case it needs to start a new transaction in the middle of the
truncate (ext3 guarantees that a partially-completed truncate
will be consistent/completed after a crash).
* The read/write of the file's [dt]indirect blocks from the end of
the file to the beginning can take a lot of time, as it does
this in single-block chunks and the blocks are not contiguous.
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