[PATCH 5/6] f2fs: add a kernel thread to issue discard commands asynchronously

[Jaegeuk Kim]

On 02/08, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 06, 2017 at 07:44:03PM -0800, Jaegeuk Kim wrote:
> > Sorry for the late response due to the travel.
> > 
> > When doing fstrim with a fresh f2fs image fomatted on Intel NVMe SSD whose
> > model name is SSDPE2MW012T4, I've got the following trace.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> > So, I investigated why block_rq_complete() happened in more detail.
> > 
> > The root-caused call path looks like:
> >  - submit_bio
> >   - generic_make_request
> >    - q->make_request_fn
> >     - blk_mq_make_request
> >      - blk_mq_map_request
> >       - blk_mq_alloc_request
> >        - blk_mq_get_tag
> >         - __blk_mq_get_tag
> >          - bt_get
> >           - blk_mq_run_hw_queue
> >           - finish_wait
> >           --> this waits for pending 8 discard bios!
> 
> You're blocking on tag allocation.  How many tags per queue does
> your device have?, e.g. do a
> 
> cat /sys/block/nvme0n1/mq/0/nr_tags

It shows 1023.

> > It seems the problem comes from the storage processing discard commands too
> > slowly comparing to normal read/write IOs.
> > 
> > Any thoughts?
> 
> Deallocate is always going to be an exception path compared to normal
> read/write… but just how much slower is going to be device
> dependent.
> 
> One option would be to reuse the number of discards, for that can you
> try the series here to support vectored discards:
> 
> http://git.infradead.org/users/hch/block.git/shortlog/refs/heads/vectored-discard-for-axboe

I tried this, but couldn't see any difference.

Thanks,