qemu/include
Kevin Wolf 984a32f17e file-posix: Support FUA writes
Until now, FUA was always emulated with a separate flush after the write
for file-posix. The overhead of processing a second request can reduce
performance significantly for a guest disk that has disabled the write
cache, especially if the host disk is already write through, too, and
the flush isn't actually doing anything.

Advertise support for REQ_FUA in write requests and implement it for
Linux AIO and io_uring using the RWF_DSYNC flag for write requests. The
thread pool still performs a separate fdatasync() call. This can be
improved later by using the pwritev2() syscall if available.

As an example, this is how fio numbers can be improved in some scenarios
with this patch (all using virtio-blk with cache=directsync on an nvme
block device for the VM, fio with ioengine=libaio,direct=1,sync=1):

                              | old           | with FUA support
------------------------------+---------------+-------------------
bs=4k, iodepth=1, numjobs=1   |  45.6k iops   |  56.1k iops
bs=4k, iodepth=1, numjobs=16  | 183.3k iops   | 236.0k iops
bs=4k, iodepth=16, numjobs=1  | 258.4k iops   | 311.1k iops

However, not all scenarios are clear wins. On another slower disk I saw
little to no improvment. In fact, in two corner case scenarios, I even
observed a regression, which I however consider acceptable:

1. On slow host disks in a write through cache mode, when the guest is
   using virtio-blk in a separate iothread so that polling can be
   enabled, and each completion is quickly followed up with a new
   request (so that polling gets it), it can happen that enabling FUA
   makes things slower - the additional very fast no-op flush we used to
   have gave the adaptive polling algorithm a success so that it kept
   polling. Without it, we only have the slow write request, which
   disables polling. This is a problem in the polling algorithm that
   will be fixed later in this series.

2. With a high queue depth, it can be beneficial to have flush requests
   for another reason: The optimisation in bdrv_co_flush() that flushes
   only once per write generation acts as a synchronisation mechanism
   that lets all requests complete at the same time. This can result in
   better batching and if the disk is very fast (I only saw this with a
   null_blk backend), this can make up for the overhead of the flush and
   improve throughput. In theory, we could optionally introduce a
   similar artificial latency in the normal completion path to achieve
   the same kind of completion batching. This is not implemented in this
   series.

Compatibility is not a concern for the kernel side of io_uring, it has
supported RWF_DSYNC from the start. However, io_uring_prep_writev2() is
not available before liburing 2.2.

Linux AIO started supporting it in Linux 4.13 and libaio 0.3.111. The
kernel is not a problem for any supported build platform, so it's not
necessary to add runtime checks. However, openSUSE is still stuck with
an older libaio version that would break the build.

We must detect the presence of the writev2 functions in the user space
libraries at build time to avoid build failures.

Signed-off-by: Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com>
Message-ID: <20250307221634.71951-2-kwolf@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com>
2025-03-13 17:44:55 +01:00
..
accel cpus: Introduce SysemuCPUOps::has_work() handler 2025-03-09 17:00:47 +01:00
authz Prefer 'on' | 'off' over 'yes' | 'no' for bool options 2021-01-29 17:07:53 +00:00
block file-posix: Support FUA writes 2025-03-13 17:44:55 +01:00
chardev chardev/char-hub: implement backend chardev aggregator 2025-02-03 13:57:08 +04:00
crypto crypto: Remove qcrypto_tls_session_get_handshake_status 2025-02-14 15:19:03 -03:00
disas disas: Fix build against Capstone v6 (again) 2024-11-05 10:09:59 +00:00
exec migration: ram block cpr blockers 2025-03-10 12:09:24 -03:00
fpu fpu: Move m68k_denormal fmt flag into floatx80_behaviour 2025-02-25 15:32:57 +00:00
gdbstub gdbstub/helpers: Introduce ldtul_$endian_p() helpers 2024-10-15 11:55:09 -03:00
hw xen/passthrough: use gsi to map pirq when dom0 is PVH 2025-03-10 13:25:14 +01:00
io io: Add a read flag for relaxed EOF 2025-02-14 15:19:04 -03:00
libdecnumber Replace config-time define HOST_WORDS_BIGENDIAN 2022-04-06 10:50:37 +02:00
migration migration: Add save_live_complete_precopy_thread handler 2025-03-06 06:47:33 +01:00
monitor monitor: Remove obsolete stubs 2024-06-30 19:51:44 +03:00
net net: checksum: Convert data to void * 2024-11-25 13:59:50 +08:00
qapi error: define g_autoptr() cleanup function for the Error type 2025-03-06 06:47:33 +01:00
qemu -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- 2025-03-11 09:26:40 +08:00
qobject qapi: Move include/qapi/qmp/ to include/qobject/ 2025-02-10 15:33:16 +01:00
qom qom: remove unused field 2025-01-10 23:34:44 +01:00
scsi hw/ufs: Support for UFS logical unit 2023-09-07 14:01:29 -04:00
semihosting semihosting/console: Avoid including 'cpu.h' 2025-01-17 10:44:00 +00:00
standard-headers linux-headers: Update to Linux v6.14-rc3 2025-03-04 15:42:54 +10:00
system block: Remove unused blk_op_is_blocked() 2025-03-11 15:49:14 +01:00
tcg tcg: Introduce the 'z' constraint for a hardware zero register 2025-02-18 08:29:03 -08:00
ui ui/input-legacy.c: remove unused legacy qemu_add_kbd_event_handler() function 2024-11-08 11:06:42 +01:00
user user: Extract common MMAP API to 'user/mmap.h' 2025-03-09 14:54:32 +01:00
elf.h util: spelling fixes 2023-08-31 19:47:43 +02:00
glib-compat.h Bump minimum glib version to v2.66 2024-05-14 12:46:24 +02:00
qemu-io.h Include qemu-common.h exactly where needed 2019-06-12 13:20:20 +02:00
qemu-main.h ui & main loop: Redesign of system-specific main thread event handling 2024-12-31 21:21:34 +01:00