Re: [PATCH v4 3/3] btrfs: use IOMAP_DIO_BOUNCE flag instead of falling back to buffered IO
David Sterba <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | org.kernel.vger.linux-btrfs,org.kernel.vger.linux-block,org.kernel.vger.linux-fsdevel,org.kernel.vger.linux-xfs |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On Tue, Jun 16, 2026 at 05:42:37PM +0930, Qu Wenruo wrote:
> Previously btrfs forces direct writes to fall back to buffered ones if the
> inode has data checksum or the profile has duplication.
>
> That fallback is to avoid the content being modified that the final
> content may mismatch with the checksum or the other mirrors.
>
> That brings a pretty huge performance cost, which already caused some
> concern at that time.
>
> But later upstream commit c9d114846b38 ("iomap: add a flag to bounce
> buffer direct I/O") introduced a new method by copying the content into
> new pages, and do all the operations based on the newly allocated pages.
>
> So let btrfs to utilize the new flag for direct writes if we require
> stable folios.
>
> There is a quick benchmark, using the following fio setup:
>
> fio --name=randwrite --filename $mnt/foobar --ioengine=libaio --size=4G \
> --rw=randwrite --iodepth=64 --runtime=60 --time_based --direct=1 \
> --bs=$blocksize
>
> Unit is MiB/s.
>
> Blocksize | Zero-copy (*) | Buffered | Bounce
> -----------+---------------+----------+-----------
> 4K | 35.1 | 17.1 | 33.8
> 64K | 522 | 251 | 492
>
> *: This is done by reverting the commit 968f19c5b1b7 ("btrfs: always
> fallback to buffered write if the inode requires checksum")
>
> Although with page bouncing the performance is only around 95% of
> true-zero copy, it's still almost double the performance of buffered
> fallback.
>
> There will be a small change in behavior, since we're using
> IOMAP_DIO_BOUNCE flag to allocate new folios, NOWAIT flag will
> immediately fail.
>
> So for true NOWAIT direct IOs, NODATASUM and RAID0/SINGLE profiles are
> still required.
>
> Signed-off-by: Qu Wenruo <[email protected]>
The block layer patches have been merged and our for-next is now based
on 7.2-rc1 so pleaase add this one too so we can get back the dio
performance. Thanks.