[Gluster-devel] [RFC] Zerofill FOP support for GlusterFS

[Niels de Vos]

On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 01:17:54PM -0400, aakash at linux.vnet.ibm.com wrote:
> 
> Add support for a new ZEROFILL fop. Zerofill writes zeroes to a file in the
> specified range. This fop will be useful when a whole file needs to be
> initialized with zero (could be useful for zero filled VM disk image
> provisioning or  during scrubbing of VM disk images).
> 
> Client/application can issue this FOP for zeroing out. Gluster server will
> zero out required range of bytes ie server offloaded zeroing. In the
> absence of
> this fop,  client/application has to repetitively issue write (zero)
> fop to the
> server, which is very inefficient method because of the overheads involved in
> RPC calls  and acknowledgements.
> 
> WRITESAME is a  SCSI T10 command that takes a block of data as input
> and writes
> the same data to other blocks and this write is handled completely within the
> storage and hence is known as offload . Linux ,now has support for SCSI
> WRITESAME command which is exposed to the user in the form of
> BLKZEROOUT ioctl.
> BD Xlator can exploit BLKZEROOUT ioctl to implement this fop. Thus zeroing out
> operations can be completely offloaded to the storage device ,
> making it highly
> efficient.

Just wondering (and I think it was mentioned earlier by Vijay already), 
why not implement a WRITESAME fop and detect in the storage xlators if 
the BLKZEROOUT ioctl() should be used in the case of writing zero's?

I'll try to keep an eye open on the merging of this change. Whenever 
that happens, we can send a patch to Wireshark so that the new fop gets 
detected correctly.

Thanks,
Niels

> 
> The fop takes two arguments offset and size. It zeroes out 'size' number of
> bytes in an opened file starting from 'offset' position.
> 
> This patch adds zerofill support to the following areas:
> 
>         - libglusterfs
>         - io-stats
>         - performance/md-cache,open-behind
>         - quota
>         - cluster/afr,dht,stripe
>         - rpc/xdr
>         - protocol/client,server
>         - io-threads
>         - marker
>         - storage/posix
>         - libgfapi
> 
> Client applications can exloit this fop by using glfs_zerofill introduced in
> libgfapi.FUSE support to this fop has not been added as there is no
> system call
> for this fop.
> 
> TODO :
>      * Add zerofill support to trace xlator
>      * Expose zerofill capability as part of gluster volume info
> 
> Here is a performance comparison of server offloaded zeofill vs zeroing out
> using repeated writes.
> 
> [root at llmvm02 remote]# time ./offloaded aakash-test log 20
> 
> real        3m34.155s
> user        0m0.018s
> sys        0m0.040s
> [root at llmvm02 remote]# time ./manually aakash-test log 20
> 
> real        4m23.043s
> user        0m2.197s
> sys        0m14.457s
> [root at llmvm02 remote]# time ./offloaded aakash-test log 25;
> 
> real        4m28.363s
> user        0m0.021s
> sys        0m0.025s
> [root at llmvm02 remote]# time ./manually aakash-test log 25
> 
> real        5m34.278s
> user        0m2.957s
> sys        0m18.808s
> 
> The argument 'log' is a file which we want to set for logging purpose and the
> third argument is size in GB .
> 
> As we can see there is a performance improvement of around 20% with
> this fop. For
> block devices with the use of BLKZEROOUT ioctl, we can improve the
> performance even more.
> 
> The applications used for performance comparison can be found here:
> 
> For manually writing zeros: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4jeWncLrfS3LVNybW9lR2dPZkk/edit?usp=sharing
> 
> For offloaded zeroing : https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4jeWncLrfS3LVNybW9lR2dPZkk/edit?usp=sharing
> 
> Change-Id: I081159f5f7edde0ddb78169fb4c21c776ec91a18
> Signed-off-by: Aakash Lal Das <aakash at linux.vnet.ibm.com>
> 
> 
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-- 
Niels de Vos
Sr. Software Maintenance Engineer
Support Engineering Group
Red Hat Global Support Services