This patch modifies dm-snapshot so that it prefetches the buffers when
loading the exceptions.
The number of buffers read ahead is specified in the DM_PREFETCH_CHUNKS
macro. The current value for DM_PREFETCH_CHUNKS (12) was found to
provide the best performance on a single 15k SCSI spindle. In the
future we may modify this default or make it configurable.
Also, introduce the function dm_bufio_set_minimum_buffers to setup
bufio's number of internal buffers before freeing happens. dm-bufio may
hold more buffers if enough memory is available. There is no guarantee
that the specified number of buffers will be available - if you need a
guarantee, use the argument reserved_buffers for
dm_bufio_client_create.
Signed-off-by: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
Use dm-bufio for initial loading of the exceptions.
Introduce a new function dm_bufio_forget that frees the given buffer.
Signed-off-by: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
This patch introduces a new function dm_bufio_prefetch. It prefetches
the specified range of blocks into dm-bufio cache without waiting
for i/o completion.
Signed-off-by: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Alasdair G Kergon <agk@redhat.com>
The dm-bufio interface allows you to do cached I/O on devices,
holding recently-read blocks in memory and performing delayed writes.
We don't use buffer cache or page cache already present in the kernel, because:
* we need to handle block sizes larger than a page
* we can't allocate memory to perform reads or we'd have deadlocks
Currently, when a cache is required, we limit its size to a fraction of
available memory. Usage can be viewed and changed in
/sys/module/dm_bufio/parameters/ .
The first user is thin provisioning, but more dm users are planned.
Signed-off-by: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Alasdair G Kergon <agk@redhat.com>
