linux-imx

raid5: relieve lock contention in get_active_stripe()

get_active_stripe() is the last place we have lock contention. It has two
paths. One is stripe isn't found and new stripe is allocated, the other is
stripe is found.

The first path basically calls __find_stripe and init_stripe. It accesses
conf->generation, conf->previous_raid_disks, conf->raid_disks,
conf->prev_chunk_sectors, conf->chunk_sectors, conf->max_degraded,
conf->prev_algo, conf->algorithm, the stripe_hashtbl and inactive_list. Except
stripe_hashtbl and inactive_list, other fields are changed very rarely.

With this patch, we split inactive_list and add new hash locks. Each free
stripe belongs to a specific inactive list. Which inactive list is determined
by stripe's lock_hash. Note, even a stripe hasn't a sector assigned, it has a
lock_hash assigned. Stripe's inactive list is protected by a hash lock, which
is determined by it's lock_hash too. The lock_hash is derivied from current
stripe_hashtbl hash, which guarantees any stripe_hashtbl list will be assigned
to a specific lock_hash, so we can use new hash lock to protect stripe_hashtbl
list too. The goal of the new hash locks introduced is we can only use the new
locks in the first path of get_active_stripe(). Since we have several hash
locks, lock contention is relieved significantly.

The first path of get_active_stripe() accesses other fields, since they are
changed rarely, changing them now need take conf->device_lock and all hash
locks. For a slow path, this isn't a problem.

If we need lock device_lock and hash lock, we always lock hash lock first. The
tricky part is release_stripe and friends. We need take device_lock first.
Neil's suggestion is we put inactive stripes to a temporary list and readd it
to inactive_list after device_lock is released. In this way, we add stripes to
temporary list with device_lock hold and remove stripes from the list with hash
lock hold. So we don't allow concurrent access to the temporary list, which
means we need allocate temporary list for all participants of release_stripe.

One downside is free stripes are maintained in their inactive list, they can't
across between the lists. By default, we have total 256 stripes and 8 lists, so
each list will have 32 stripes. It's possible one list has free stripe but
other list hasn't. The chance should be rare because stripes allocation are
even distributed. And we can always allocate more stripes for cache, several
mega bytes memory isn't a big deal.

This completely removes the lock contention of the first path of
get_active_stripe(). It slows down the second code path a little bit though
because we now need takes two locks, but since the hash lock isn't contended,
the overhead should be quite small (several atomic instructions). The second
path of get_active_stripe() (basically sequential write or big request size
randwrite) still has lock contentions.

Signed-off-by: Shaohua Li <shli@fusionio.com>
Signed-off-by: NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de>