The background blockgc scanner runs on a 5m interval by default and
trims preallocation (post-eof and cow fork) from inodes that are
otherwise idle. Idle effectively means that iolock can be acquired
without blocking and that the inode has no dirty pagecache or I/O in
flight.

This simple mechanism and heuristic has worked fairly well for
post-eof speculative preallocations. Support for reflink and COW
fork preallocations came sometime later and plugged into the same
mechanism, with similar heuristics. Some recent testing has shown
that COW fork preallocation may be notably more sensitive to blockgc
processing than post-eof preallocation, however.

For example, consider an 8GB reflinked file with a COW extent size
hint of 1MB. A worst case fully randomized overwrite of this file
results in ~8k extents of an average size of ~1MB. If the same
workload is interrupted a couple times for blockgc processing
(assuming the file goes idle), the resulting extent count explodes
to over 100k extents with an average size <100kB. This is
significantly worse than ideal and essentially defeats the COW
extent size hint mechanism.

While this particular test is instrumented, it reflects a fairly
reasonable pattern in practice where random I/Os might spread out
over a large period of time with varying periods of (in)activity.
For example, consider a cloned disk image file for a VM or container
with long uptime and variable and bursty usage. A background blockgc
scan that races and processes the image file when it happens to be
clean and idle can have a significant effect on the future
fragmentation level of the file, even when still in use.

To help combat this, update the heuristic to skip cowblocks inodes
that are currently opened for write access during non-sync blockgc
scans. This allows COW fork preallocations to persist for as long as
possible unless otherwise needed for functional purposes (i.e. a
sync scan), the file is idle and closed, or the inode is being
evicted from cache. While here, update the comments to help
distinguish performance oriented heuristics from the logic that
exists to maintain functional correctness.
Suggested-by: Darrick Wong <djwong@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Brian Foster <bfoster@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Darrick J. Wong <djwong@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Carlos Maiolino <cem@kernel.org>