• Theodore Ts'o's avatar
    ext4: optimize mballoc for large allocations · 40ae3487
    Theodore Ts'o authored
    The ext4 block allocator only maintains buddy bitmaps for chunks which
    are less than or equal to one quarter of a block group.  That is, for
    a file aystem with a 1k blocksize, and where the number of blocks in a
    block group is 8192 blocks, the largest chunk size tracked by buddy
    bitmaps is 2048 blocks.
    
    For a file system with a 4k blocksize, and where the number of blocks
    in a block group is 32768 blocks, the largest chunk size tracked by
    buddy bitmaps is 8192 blocks.
    
    To work around this code, mballoc.c before this commit would truncate
    allocation requests to the number of blocks in a block group minus 10.
    Why 10?  Aside from being a completely arbitrary number, it avoids
    block allocation to be a power of two larger than 25% of the block
    group.  If you try to explicitly fallocate 50% of the block group
    size, this will demonstrate the problem; the block allocation code
    will scan the all of the blocks in the file system with cr==0 (since
    the request is for a natural power of two), but then completely fail
    for all blocks groups, since the buddy bitmaps don't track chunk sizes
    of 50% of the block group.
    
    To fix this, in these we use ext4_mb_complex_scan_group() instead of
    ext4_mb_simple_scan_group().
    Signed-off-by: default avatar"Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
    Cc: Andreas Dilger <adilger@dilger.ca>
    40ae3487
mballoc.c 139 KB