linux-kernel-test/include
Wu Fengguang 0141450f66 readahead: introduce FMODE_RANDOM for POSIX_FADV_RANDOM
This fixes inefficient page-by-page reads on POSIX_FADV_RANDOM.

POSIX_FADV_RANDOM used to set ra_pages=0, which leads to poor performance:
a 16K read will be carried out in 4 _sync_ 1-page reads.

In other places, ra_pages==0 means
- it's ramfs/tmpfs/hugetlbfs/sysfs/configfs
- some IO error happened
where multi-page read IO won't help or should be avoided.

POSIX_FADV_RANDOM actually want a different semantics: to disable the
*heuristic* readahead algorithm, and to use a dumb one which faithfully
submit read IO for whatever application requests.

So introduce a flag FMODE_RANDOM for POSIX_FADV_RANDOM.

Note that the random hint is not likely to help random reads performance
noticeably.  And it may be too permissive on huge request size (its IO
size is not limited by read_ahead_kb).

In Quentin's report (http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/12/24/145), the overall
(NFS read) performance of the application increased by 313%!

Tested-by: Quentin Barnes <qbarnes+nfs@yahoo-inc.com>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Cc: Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>
Cc: Steven Whitehouse <swhiteho@redhat.com>
Cc: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: Trond Myklebust <Trond.Myklebust@netapp.com>
Cc: Chuck Lever <chuck.lever@oracle.com>
Cc: <stable@kernel.org>			[2.6.33.x]
Cc: <qbarnes+nfs@yahoo-inc.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2010-03-06 11:26:25 -08:00
..
acpi Merge branch 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tj/percpu 2010-03-03 07:34:18 -08:00
asm-generic
crypto
drm Merge branch 'drm-radeon-testing' of /ssd/git/drm-radeon-next into drm-next-stage 2010-03-01 16:08:57 +10:00
keys
linux readahead: introduce FMODE_RANDOM for POSIX_FADV_RANDOM 2010-03-06 11:26:25 -08:00
math-emu
media V4L/DVB: tuner-types: Add Sony BTF-Pxn01Z tuner type used on GigaPocket cards 2010-02-26 15:11:07 -03:00
mtd
net 9P2010.L handshake: Remove "dotu" variable 2010-03-05 15:04:42 -06:00
pcmcia Merge branch 'master' of /home/davem/src/GIT/linux-2.6/ 2010-02-28 19:23:06 -08:00
rdma Merge branch 'misc' into for-next 2010-03-01 23:52:31 -08:00
rxrpc
scsi
sound Merge branch 'topic/asoc' into for-linus 2010-03-01 12:38:59 +01:00
trace Merge branch 'kvm-updates/2.6.34' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/virt/kvm/kvm 2010-03-05 13:12:34 -08:00
video video: sh_mobile_lcdcfb: Add wait for vsync. 2010-02-16 13:30:27 +09:00
xen
Kbuild